A Catholic university in Portland, Oregon, is no longer requiring theology majors to take a class on "Biblical Texts."
The University of Portland now says theology students can take courses such as "Queer Theologies," or "God Our Mother."
Instead of guiding and teaching students, the move fulfills the students’ need for “autonomy” to explore their own “faith traditions,” the department chair David Turnbloom told the student newspaper.
Matt Lamb of The College Fix says it should come as no surprise that the school is getting rid of the biblical text requirements.
"When you consider that the chair of the department has compared people who oppose, homosexual lifestyles to the soldiers who killed Christ … He wrote this three years ago in a Good Friday reflection."
Lamb says most Catholic parents send their kids off to Catholic schools expecting the university will teach the beliefs of that religious group.
"So I think this is why parents need to know that just because they send their kids to a university that has Catholic in it, it's not guaranteed that they're going to learn or keep the faith."
Lamb says a few years ago there was a session where students cried because a priest objected to an LGBT pride flag in the residence hall.
Turnbloom did not respond to multiple emails requesting more information about the changes in required courses.
Catholic institutions overtaken
However, C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League, told The Fix via email that this change at the University of Portland is one more example of how “faithful Catholics have been dispossessed of their own institutions by modernist heretics.”
Too many Catholic colleges and universities have been overtaken by leadership beholden to secular influences, Doyle said.
There’s an “arrogant conviction that Catholic higher education belongs not to the church nor to the Catholic community but to an entitled class of culturally conforming academics who believe themselves unconstrained by any fidelity to the Catholic truth or to ecclesiastical authority.”
