NUNTIATORIA

“No, DEI Does Not Mean God”: The Confused Complicity of Catholics with Secular Ideologies

Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell of Washington recently urged Catholics to embrace “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” because “Dei” means God. What may have seemed to him a witty play on words has, in fact, exposed a deeper crisis within the Church: the accommodation of secular ideologies by well-meaning Catholics, who in their zeal to appear compassionate or relevant end up confusing the Gospel with the slogans of the world.

The Sanctity of the Divine Name
The commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (Exod. 20:7), forbids not only blasphemy, but also the trivialisation of the divine. The Catechism of the Council of Trent warns that “to profane the most holy name of God is a crime of the deepest guilt”¹. Equating Dei with DEI is not clever catechesis, but a profanation: it drags what is sacred into the mire of bureaucratic jargon, as if God’s majesty could be pressed into service to authenticate fashionable acronyms.

The Ideology of DEI
The DEI agenda is not a neutral program of fairness. Its underlying philosophy is rooted in identity politics and critical social theories which are in direct conflict with Catholic anthropology. “Diversity” reduces persons to their external categories; “Equity” substitutes forced equality of outcomes for justice; “Inclusion” demands the normalization of lifestyles condemned by Scripture and Tradition². What Catholics hear as universal charity, the world uses as ideological enforcement. When bishops and institutions adopt this framework, they participate in a rival anthropology—one that defines man not as imago Dei but as a creature of oppression and power.

The Complicity of Catholics
Why, then, do so many Catholics—priests, teachers, laity—embrace DEI? It is not from malice, but from confusion. DEI borrows words that sound Christian: who would oppose diversity, fairness, or inclusion when rightly understood? Yet when Catholics uncritically accept the world’s definitions, they replace theological truth with sociological slogans. This is how well-meaning Catholics become complicit: in trying to show kindness, they absorb the assumptions of secular culture, allowing the Church’s teaching to be reshaped by the world’s categories.

Institutional Conformity
The capitulation has become institutional. Catholic universities proudly boast of DEI offices, staffed with coordinators who speak in the language of grievance rather than grace. Catholic charities adopt “inclusive” policies to secure funding, quietly downplaying or even contradicting Catholic moral teaching³. Diocesan structures now echo corporate HR departments, as if unity in Christ could be measured by compliance with ideological frameworks. What was once the distinctive voice of the Church is being harmonised into the chorus of secular institutions, with scarcely a note of dissonance.

Historical Parallels
This temptation is not new. The Church has always had to resist the seduction of false humanisms. Pope Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris warned against “false humanitarianism” that cloaks materialist ideologies with the rhetoric of fraternity⁴. Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis condemned modernists for seeking “to harmonize faith with the false philosophies of the time”⁵. Today’s DEI slogans are but the latest iteration of that perennial error: the substitution of temporal ideologies for the eternal Gospel.

The True Catholic Vision of Unity
St. Paul declared to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The Church’s unity is supernatural, born of baptism and sanctifying grace, not engineered by quotas or categories. The Body of Christ transcends all human divisions, not by erasing difference, but by ordering it to a higher harmony. To replace this vision with the abstractions of DEI is to reduce divine charity to social management.

The Danger of Blasphemous Substitution
St. Thomas Aquinas defined blasphemy as attributing to creatures what belongs to God alone⁶. When bishops and institutions equate DEI with God, they do not merely trivialise the sacred; they distort the very foundations of conscience. The faithful are left to believe that resisting ideology is resisting God, while conformity to worldly slogans is obedience to Christ. Thus does the age-old command to “love thy neighbour” become corrupted into an endorsement of whatever policies the secular world baptises as compassionate.

A Call to Clarity and Courage
The crisis of our age is not only external pressure but internal confusion. Catholics, desiring to do good, are ensnared by the slogans of the zeitgeist. Bishops, anxious to appear relevant, trivialise the faith to suit passing fashions. Institutions, fearful of rejection, adopt policies that contradict the very Gospel they exist to serve. The way forward is not complicity but clarity: to distinguish between the language of charity and the rhetoric of ideology, between divine justice and political engineering.

True diversity is the manifold richness of God’s gifts. True equity is the justice of God, who “renders to every man according to his works” (Rom. 2:6). True inclusion is the universal call to holiness, extended to all men but conditioned upon repentance and faith. Anything less is counterfeit, and no wordplay will make it divine.

Footnotes

1. Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part III, The Second Commandment.
2. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons (2003).
3. See Hilary Towers, “How Catholic Charities Lost Its Way,” Crisis Magazine, October 14, 2021.
4. Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris (1937), §§9–10.
5. Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), §39.
6. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q.13, a.1–2.