Georgetown Law professors William Treanor and Amy Uelmen have crafted a remarkably dishonest defense of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, disguising radical left-wing ideology as Catholic tradition. Their recent essay in America magazine represents not scholarly analysis but pure propaganda, a cynical attempt to baptize secular progressivism with holy water while hoping no one notices the fundamental contradiction.

The audacity of their argument is staggering. These professors claim that opposition to DEI constitutes an attack on religious freedom. In fact, they themselves have already surrendered Georgetown’s Catholic identity to the altar of woke orthodoxy. They invoke papal encyclicals and Jesuit tradition to justify programs that would be utterly foreign to any Catholic thinker before the cultural revolution of the 1960s. This is intellectual dishonesty masquerading as theological sophistication.

Consider the manipulation in their core argument. They quote Pope Francis on including those on the “periphery” to defend bureaucratic systems that sort students and faculty by skin color and sexual orientation. They cite Pope John Paul II’s call for solidarity to justify dividing the human family into oppressor and victim classes. This is not interpretation but perversion. They take sacred texts and twist them to serve an agenda their original authors would have condemned in a heartbeat.

The authors know full well that Catholic social teaching has never endorsed the racial preferences or identity-based hiring that define today’s DEI programs. They know the Church’s concern for the poor and marginalized has always rested on universal human dignity and not group grievance. Yet they present these modern inventions as if they flowed naturally from centuries of Catholic wisdom.

Their treatment of Jesuit history proves equally disingenuous. They invoke the order’s missionary zeal and cultural adaptation to justify contemporary identity politics. They conveniently ignore that those early Jesuits subordinated every earthly concern to the salvation of souls and the glory of God. St. Ignatius of Loyola founded his order to combat Protestant heresy and defend Catholic orthodoxy—not to advance secular social justice causes that reduce human beings to demographic categories. The idea that these spiritual warriors would recognize their successors in today’s diversity administrators would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

The professors’ defense of their curriculum exposes the depths of their intellectual corruption. Pressed by federal prosecutors over their DEI agenda, they hid behind the First Amendment and invoked religious liberty. They claimed the right to teach in accordance with their Catholic mission. But what mission is that? The mission to split students by skin color? The mission to trade merit and moral fidelity for quotas and fashionable ideology? That is not religious freedom. If anything, it’s religious fraud.

The professors compound their dishonesty by portraying critics of DEI as enemies of inclusion and justice. But the truth is precisely the opposite. To oppose DEI is not to oppose inclusion; it is to defend an older and deeper vision of human dignity. 

Catholic teaching has always proclaimed something far more radical than the bureaucratic jargon of today’s progressives: that every single person, without exception, is created in the image of God, infinitely precious, and worthy of respect that transcends race, sex, or social standing. The Church affirmed this long before “inclusion” became a trendy hashtag. What DEI calls diversity is shallow bookkeeping; what Catholicism calls human dignity is an ontological truth. 

Perhaps most galling is the way these professors borrow the language of martyrdom. They pose as guardians of faith under siege, claiming to stand courageously against government persecution. Again, one might smirk if it weren’t so sickening. This comes from faculty at an institution that has spent decades draining its Catholic lifeblood, steadily removing the Church from its classrooms, elevating professors openly hostile to her teaching, and fostering an atmosphere where faithful Catholics feel despised rather than defended. 

To watch such people cast themselves as martyrs is a farce. They long ago gave to Caesar what was meant for God. They abandoned the Cross for the campus creed, and now they expect praise for betraying the very mission they were supposed to serve.

The truth is that Georgetown Law, like so many once-Catholic universities, stopped being authentically faithful decades ago. The name and the symbols remain, but the substance is gone. The professors’ essay only confirms what has long been obvious: these institutions serve progressive politics first and Catholic teaching not at all. Their appeal to Jesuit tradition is not reverence but grave robbery—digging up the bones of saints to dress their ideology in stolen vestments.

A truly Catholic response to this crisis would begin with honesty about what the Church teaches. It would demand courage to live by those teachings no matter the social cost. It would remember that Catholic education is meant to form students in wisdom and virtue—not groom them for political activism. It would trust that hearts transformed by grace will work for justice in ways that honor human dignity rather than weaponize it.

The professors may fool themselves, and they may fool their progressive allies, but they cannot fool history. History will mark their generation as the one that sold its Catholic birthright for a mess of ideological pottage. The tragedy is not that they face scrutiny from the state but that they have earned it by betraying the very mission they pretend to defend.

John Mac Ghlionn, Crisis Magazine