WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — FBI Director Kash Patel told Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) that FBI officials had been fired due to the bureau’s targeting of traditional Catholics, as shown by an infamous leaked 2023 memo.

Hawley questioned Patel about the FBI’s response to the persecution of Christians, especially Catholics, in the U.S. during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.

Referring to the bombshell memo, created under the leadership of former FBI Director Christopher Wray, Hawley asked Patel how the FBI came to recruit informants in Christian churches.

Patel said the FBI has made “permanent fixes” to ensure that informants are not placed in houses of worship unless needed for an “ongoing criminal or terrorism threat.”

“Has anybody been fired for this?” Hawley asked.

“There have been terminations related to this and resignations,” Patel said. The memo in question called for spying on and infiltrating traditional Roman Catholic groups, in particular, churches served by the traditional Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). The document claimed that so-called “Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology” was a magnet for “violent extremists.”

“Good… Because if this is gonna be standard at the FBI, nobody can trust the FBI,” replied Hawley. “You wanna talk about violation of the First Amendment? This has got First Amendment violation written all over it.” 

“It is one of the most revolting chapters in the FBI’s history,” he added.

During the hearing, Hawley highlighted the heightened attacks on Christians in recent years, including shootings at Christian elementary schools and acts of vandalism and arson against churches across the country, as well as the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an outspoken Christian.

The senator cited a report that found that there were over 400 instances of hostility against churches in the U.S. in 2024, while another report found that there were over 500 attacks on Catholic parishes alone since May of 2020.

“What is the FBI doing to take on this rising tide of violence that seems to be motivated by anti-religious hatred?” asked Hawley.

Patel said the FBI is investigating 60 reports of anti-Catholic hate crimes, adding that he was able to disclose that the agency is conducting anti-Catholic hate crime investigations in the cities of Kansas City, Louisville, Houston, Nashville, and Richmond specifically.

When questioned about whether the FBI would investigate more deeply into potential “cells” helping to fund and facilitate such anti-Catholic attacks, Patel assured Hawley, “We are not stopping at the perpetrators themselves.”

The FBI director said his agency is “reverse engineering” the chain of events leading to such hate crimes to hold accountable those who fund them. 

Months after the memo targeting traditional Catholics was released, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) announced that documents that he obtained from the FBI indicated that its field office in Richmond, Virginia, coordinated with two other offices across the country to spy on traditional Catholics. 

The finding appeared to contradict Wray’s previous testimony that the FBI memo targeting traditional Catholics was only utilized at the one location in Richmond.  

Violence against churches in the U.S. escalated after the leak of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. That decision, Dobbs v. Jackson, inspired a wave of threats and vandalism against churches and pregnancy centers, which mostly went unpunished, with former Attorney General Merrick Garland citing the supposed difficulty of gathering evidence.

However, hate crimes against Christians had already been growing in the country. A 2023 report from the Family Research Council (FRC) found that anti-Christian attacks on churches steadily increased from 2018 to 2022.

FRC “identified a total of 420 documented acts of hostility that targeted 397 individual churches” in the U.S. during that period.

The recent high-profile assassination of evangelical Christian Charlie Kirk has been described by some commentators, including Tucker Carlson, as motivated by anti-Christian hatred.