Catholic University in Maryland Made Race and Rhyme Required Reading for the New Testament

Mount St. Mary's University houses the largest Catholic seminary in America.

That title just collided with a required course reading list nobody expected.

One professor's book now decides how theology majors are taught to read Scripture itself.

The Required Course Every Theology Major Must Pass

Every theology major at Mount St. Mary's must complete a course called Made in God's Image.

It's billed as an exploration of Catholic Social Teaching.

One summer 2026 section assigns something different entirely.

Professor Love Sechrest's book, Race and Rhyme: Rereading the New Testament, is required reading for students who choose her section to satisfy the mandate.

Sechrest doesn't interpret the Gospels the way two thousand years of Catholic tradition has interpreted them.

She reads the New Testament through what she calls "associative hermeneutics."

That means running Scripture through modern buzzwords instead of doctrine.

"Racial justice." "Antiracist allyship." "Cultural assimilation." "Gendered stereotypes."

A review in The Christian Century confirmed Sechrest's framework pulls directly from Critical Race Theory, blended with what the review called "womanist sensibilities."

None of that appears anywhere in the Catechism.

This Is the Same Playbook the Left Has Run for Years

Catholic educators have been fighting this exact fight since 2020.

The Cardinal Newman Society laid out ten specific reasons Critical Race Theory cannot coexist with Catholic education.

Catholic teaching says every person carries the dignity of being made in God's image.

Critical Race Theory sorts people into oppressor and oppressed categories based on skin color.

Those two frameworks cannot both be true at the same time.

Jesuit universities learned this the hard way when reparations demands and DEI mandates split entire alumni networks and forced formal apologies from school leadership.

Yale ran a related course applying DEI and critical theory frameworks to the New Testament, according to Campus Reform's reporting.

This isn't an isolated professor doing something strange in one classroom.

It's a pattern spreading through Catholic higher education one required course at a time.

https://twitter.com/OwenGregorian/status/2085707259892429121

The Left Can't Win the Argument So It Rewrites the Book

The left knows it cannot win a fair debate about what Christianity actually teaches.

So instead of losing that argument, activists change the subject entirely.

They take a tradition built on grace, sin, and redemption for every individual soul, and they rebuild it around group identity and power dynamics.

Gateway Pundit's reporting on this made the pattern explicit: when ideas can't win on merit, they get made mandatory instead.

Notice that theology majors don't get a choice to opt out of the requirement itself.

They can pick a different section. They cannot escape the underlying framework baked into the course catalog.

That's not academic freedom. That's ideological capture with a syllabus attached.

Parents Paying Catholic Tuition Deserve to Know What They're Buying

Families send their kids to Mount St. Mary's because they want a Catholic education grounded in Catholic doctrine.

They are not paying tuition so a theology requirement can double as a Critical Race Theory seminar with Bible verses attached.

The university's own course catalog still describes Made in God's Image as an exploration of Catholic Social Teaching.

Nothing in that description mentions "antiracist allyship" as a core Catholic value, because it isn't one.

Every diocese watching this needs to ask the same question parents are already asking.

If a required theology course can be quietly rewritten around secular ideology, what stops it from happening in every department next.

Sources:

• Mike LaChance, "Catholic Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland Requires Course That Teaches the New Testament Through 'Racial Justice' Lens," The Gateway Pundit, August 6, 2026.
• Campus Reform, "Required Mount St. Mary's theology course teaches New Testament through 'racial justice' lens," Campus Reform, August 4, 2026.
• Cardinal Newman Society, "10 Ways Catholic Education and Critical Race Theory Are Incompatible," Cardinal Newman Society.