(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The man who inspired the FBI’s controversial report on “radical-traditionalist Catholics” told a judge earlier this month that he’s renounced his Christianity.
That man, Xavier Lopez, is set to be sentenced for terrorism-related offenses, which stem from agents finding Molotov cocktail-type devices in his home in 2022.
As Headline USA has detailed, Lopez was on law enforcement’s radar since September 2018, when he attempted suicide. Lopez was 18 years old at the time. The FBI opened an assessment into Lopez about a year later after he allegedly made online statements advocating civil war and the murder of politicians.
🚨NEW🚨The man who inspired the FBI’s controversial report on “radical-traditionalist Catholics” told a judge earlier this month that he’s renounced his Christianity.
Story below pic.twitter.com/u6Jxcg4B8P— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) September 18, 2024
Law enforcement continued to monitor Lopez—including while he served a stint in jail for felony vandalism—into early 2022, when he began attending Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Chapel in Richmond, Virginia.
Shortly after Lopez started attending Our Lady of Fatima, the FBI decided to run an informant at him inside the church. The FBI later expressed concerns to the DOJ Inspector General that Lopez may have been recruiting other Lady of Fatima members to carry out an attack—though that turned out not to be the case.
After his arrest, an FBI analyst with knowledge of the investigation worked with another analyst to craft the FBI’s memo about Catholics. That memo would be leaked in early 2023, and would dominate the conservative news cycle for much of the year.
FBI Director Chris Wray has since apologized for the report, which received heavy criticism from GOP lawmakers for—among numerous other reasons—underpinning its findings with information from the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center.
Meanwhile, the man who inspired the entire fiasco, Lopez, is no longer Catholic, he said earlier this month.
“I’m no longer a Christian of any kind, and will never be again for the rest of the days I shall live,” former trad Cath Xavier Lopez told a federal judge in a Sept. 6 motion to remove his attorney.
In that motion, Lopez also expressed a willingness to renounce his American citizenship and leave the country altogether.
Lopez was set to be sentenced on Sept. 27, but the judge said last week that he will instead discuss the defendant’s motion to remove his attorney.
Lopez’s current attorney replaced his federal public defender, who said in a memo last year that his client may suffer from schizophrenia.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
