By Thomas Phippen
A convicted criminal with violent intentions attended an irregular Catholic community, and FBI agents turned it into an anti-Catholic witch hunt.
The Trump administration released a report Thursday on eradicating anti-Christian bias from government, shedding new light on an internal FBI memo which created a firestorm about religious discrimination under former President Joe Biden. The Daily Caller News Foundation pieced together a timeline of the infamous anti-Catholic memo’s origins based on an analysis of the new information and documents of the underlying case.
The January 2023 FBI memo relied heavily on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in an attempt to link entire Christian communities to violent extremism. The details of the underlying case also reveal a man who believed his intended violence was a spiritual calling — but by his own admission, his chosen church rejected his neo-Nazi ideology. (RELATED: Who Are The Prosecutors Going After SPLC?)
The FBI’s Richmond Field Office “justified its actions through misplaced reliance on baseless allegations from the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] and the religious affiliation of one law enforcement target, with no legitimate connection between the target’s religion and the crimes for which he was investigated and ultimately convicted,” according to the Justice Department’s (DOJ) report on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government.”
While the Richmond Field Office’s memo was the subject of significant reporting, most of the media coverage glossed over the actual criminal case that sparked it. Notably, only a few reports identified Xavier Lopez, who was sentenced in February 2025 to eight years in prison for possessing weapons as a felon.
The Thursday report promised that a future report from the Weaponization Working Group will detail “the day-to-day weaponization of the Richmond Field Office against conservative, practicing Catholics on the basis of guilt-by association because one career criminal attended a local Catholic church.”
Molotov Cocktails, Nazi Flags And Crucifixes
The federal case against Lopez alleged he harbored deep racial hatred, manifesting as weighing plans to attack Jews and blacks, having a Nazi flag in his room, and linking his violent fantasies with a spiritual calling. He attended a chapel in Richmond which was part of Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist Catholic group with a markedly chaotic relationship with the Vatican. The SSPX, which rejected Vatican offers for dialogue in February and appears intent on ordaining bishops in defiance of papal authority, is devoted to celebrating the liturgy of the Holy Mass in the traditional Latin Rite, also known as the Extraordinary Form. (RELATED: Vatican Scrambles To Prevent New Schism As SSPX Plans Rogue Bishop Consecrations)
Lopez was arrested in 2020 for slashing tires of his neighbors’ vehicles and pled guilty to vandalism. He was released in July 2021, but Henrico County police arrested him again in November 2022 on a charge of paramilitary activity, according to court documents. Agents raided his house, finding molotov cocktails, 3-D printers they suspected were to be used to build weapons and Nazi swastikas.
A bottle containing incendiary chemicals was found in Xavier Lopez’s room along with ammunition and Nazi insignia. US DOJ/Court documents
Lopez described himself as a “radical traditional Catholic Clerical Fascist,” according to court documents. In a letter he wrote from prison in 2021 to his aunt, with whom he had lived in the Richmond area, Lopez wrote that he believed serving God meant violently opposing the U.S. government. He preferred to “die by the sword in the Lord’s name [rather] than to live long on earth peacefully serving Satan’s laws.”
He wrestled in the letter with Jesus Christ’s words that “those who live by the sword die by the sword,” but settled on the belief that “we as followers of the Lord need to understand that we must do everything in our power to erradicate [sic] evildoing either by the repentance and forgiveness of the redeemable or the bloodshed of the irrevocably ungodly.”
Lopez defended his violent ambitions as a religious calling, but he seems to have struggled to justify them. He wrote that he needed to build and store “guns, explosives and other forms of weaponry” in his aunt’s house without fear of the cops because, in a strange twist of scripture, he believed “works without faith is also dead.”
Evidence from the case against Xavier Lopez. US DOJ/Court documents.
The violent intentions do not appear to have originated in any religious community. According Lopez’s posts on the social networking site Gab which the FBI obtained in late November 2022, the church he attended was simply not extreme as he was.
“Im at an SSPX parish and I have to deal with the priest and some (thankfully not all) the parishioners talking about how ‘Hitler bad’ though thankfully they do actually acknowledge that the allies [sic] were evil,” Lopez wrote under the username Cru54d3r, according to court documents.
He also wrote on Gab about how it’s possible to find “good white women” at a “traditional church that isn’t totally kiked,” and indicated he had not been attending his current church for long but had already identified a woman who met his requirements. The woman was 17 years old, and for that reason Lopez didn’t think a relationship could be sustained.
As the FBI constructed its case against Lopez in the days after his arrest, agents prepared a list of questions for the suspected would-be domestic terrorist. The questions, released in the DOJ report Thursday, indicate the agents were hyper-focused on the ideology of the SSPX church he attended.
The questions involved whether anyone at the church shared his ideology, whether anyone at the church had given him money, and what “radical-traditional Catholic media” he consumed.
FBI email with questions for Xavier Lopez. US DOJ
Lopez had not been baptized at the time of his arrest, but he had attended the SSPX church for seven months and had gone to “3 or 4” catechism classes, according to the FBI. Fr. James Hewko, who had been ordained less than a year before, had visited Lopez multiple times in jail, according to the FBI emails released by the DOJ Thursday. Once on the FBI’s radar, they sought to interview him.
Fr. Hewko was “not cooperative” when asked about Lopez’s “desire and plans to commit violence,” an FBI agent said in an email. The email stated the priest “became very uncomfortable and started incoherently stuttering,” and also said he needed to speak with the attorneys of his religious order.
In turn, the FBI apparently researched the priest’s travel to visit his uncle — also a priest — who was involved with a group which splintered from the larger SSPX. Emails from the FBI at the time indicate they were unfamiliar with the Catholic groups.
“Although Father Hewko’s response was reasonable, the Richmond Field Office viewed it as suspicious and used their suspicion as cover for conducting a broader evaluation of Father Hewko and other traditional Catholics,” the Trump DOJ task force concluded.
The church where Fr. Hewko currently serves as priest did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. He is no longer at the Richmond SSPX parish that Lopez formerly attended.
Enter the SPLC
To make the leap from investigating the case to warning about an entire religious community the suspect had been attending for less than a year, the FBI appears to have relied on the SPLC.
The January 2023 Richmond field office memo included the SPLC’s 2021 list of “radical traditionalist Catholic hate groups,” which identified nine organizations, none of which were linked to Lopez.
The field office’s “Domain Perspective” determined radical extremism from traditionalist Catholics would likely increase ahead of the 2024 midterm elections. The memo also attempted to connect the extremism of Lopez to the SSPX based on rhetoric opposing abortion, “LGBTQ protections” and immigration. (RELATED: Hawley Goes After Merrick Garland For Arrest Of Pro-Life Father)
“FBI Richmond assesses the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development,” the memo states.
The field office made the assessment “with high confidence” — based on “high quality information from multiple sources” — that extremist individuals would gravitate toward and try to recruit from traditionalist Catholic communities like the SSPX.
Two FBI officials at the national level pushed back against the field office’s reliance on the SPLC in the memo.
One FBI official chastised the memo a few weeks after it was released, noting that the reliance on the SPLC was shaky.
The memo “does not address factors that would affect the quality and credibility of SPLC as a source for subjective information, such as its previously issuing apologies and retracting its naming of individuals or groups as extremist,” wrote Tonya Ugoretz, then assistant director of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence.
Further, the memo assumed extremism was connected to traditionalist Catholic groups “as a fact and proceeds from that assumption without substantiation,” Ugoretz wrote.
The DOJ in April accused SPLC of various wire fraud and money laundering schemes for allegedly funding members of the very extremist organizations they listed as hate groups. The grand jury indictment states that “unbeknownst to [SPLC’s] donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.
Another official stated plainly that the “FBI does not use the phrase ‘radical traditionalist catholic’ to define any domestic terrorism threat category.”
That official said that the FBI’s digital case management system, Sentinel, had only 13 files that included some version of the term “radical traditionalist catholic” or related terms. Of those, the vast majority relied on the work of the SPLC.
The backlash to the Richmond memo, marked for internal use only, was swift. Former FBI director Merrick Garland was called to testify about it in September 2023.
Prior to the FBI director’s September 2023 testimony, in which he disavowed the Richmond field office’s memo, agents discussed the issue in a meeting. The internal discussion was released in Thursday’s report.
“I feel personally responsible as I should have known the potential DT [domestic terrorism] pitfalls and the susceptibility to politicization surrounding this paper better than anyone,” one FBI agent whose name was redacted said in a July 2023 email, released in the documents Thursday.
Former FBI agent Stanley Meador, who was recently selected as Virginia’s secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security, replied: “Keep that head up, this too shall pass. Will make for a great chapter in your memoirs some day!”
