The College Fix

A class called “Racism and the Catholic Church” is slated to be taught this fall at Villanova University, a Roman Catholic, Augustinian university.

Its course description states:

Although the Catholic church understands itself as the Body of Christ, the lived history of the church in the United States shows that the church has not been able to bring blacks and whites together as members of one body. This course will explore the way in which the church has operated as an instrument of not racial unity and justice but racial segregation and white supremacy. This course seeks to empower students to draw upon the vast resources of the Catholic theological tradition in order to supply solutions to the theological problem of white supremacy.

But is this class based on sound Catholic doctrine? Writing for The Daily Caller, which first broke the story, Peter Hasson notes:

The claim that the Church isn’t the the united Body of Christ appears to be a direct contradiction of Church teaching — an explosive position from a university claiming to be “grounded in the wisdom of the Catholic intellectual tradition.”

Villanova is not the first Catholic university to offer classes that raise questions and concerns. For the last two conservative years, Notre Dame has offered a white privilege class that many consider biased, inflammatory, and meant to shame white people and indoctrinate students.

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