Catholic university speaker says white Christians should 'crucify their whiteness'

The Atkins Center for Ethics at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hosted guest speaker Miguel De La Torre in early March at an event titled "Rejecting White Christianity." The social ethics professor's March 3 lecture discussing matters of race, religious identity, and political thought argued that "Eurochristian nationalism has been used to justify white supremacy" and that "Many within communities of color, with colonized minds, seek to assimilate to a Euroamerican version of Christianity which is detrimental to their being."

Carlow University is a private Catholic institution founded by the Sisters of Mercy.

During his discourse, De La Torre, a professor of "Latinx studies" at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, said white Christians should "crucify their whiteness" and cast off social norms introduced by Judeo-Christian worldviews.

"Those of us who are colored, some of us can also be white," De La Torre said, according to The College Fix. "But the good news is there is salvation […] We [minorities of color] have to crucify our colonized minds, and for our white brothers and sisters, they need to crucify their whiteness."

De La Torre said that these notions included ideas like "hope," which he rejected and characterized as a white concept. According to De La Torre's commentary, it was these ideas that made minorities complacent to socioeconomic disparities. At one point, De La Torre called the idea "a middle-class excuse to do nothing."

"I'm defining hope through my own Latino roots," the Catholic university's guest speaker said. "In Spanish, hope is esperanza, esperanza comes from the word esperar, which means 'to wait.' And we're not quite sure what we're waiting for, or how long we're waiting for—and what we're waiting for may never come. This hope in Spanish does not mean the same thing in English."

According to De La Torre, the need for this change in thinking stemmed from subjugation to white ideas that had made the domination of minorities possible. If minorities were to recover from this way of thinking, they would have to separate themselves from the source of the ideas entirely—to cast off white Christianity.

The event sparked dissent from commentators like American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) volunteer Domenick Galatolo, who, in his article for TFP Student Action, called  De La Torre's lecture "Marxist" thinking. Galatolo questioned the school administration's reasoning for inviting a figure like De La Torre to speak at a Catholic University.

"Catholicism seeks the salvation of all men and orders society in an organic way where each person has his proper role and obligation to act morally," Galatolo wrote in the piece. "But De La Torre, by following communist ideology, seeks not to uplift the 'oppressed' but drag everyone down," Galatolo continued.