USCCB, Catholic colleges call for changes to Trump administration’s racial nondiscrimination regulations

November 04, 2026

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CWN Editor's Note: The general counsel of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, joined by the president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities and the general counsel of the Catholic University of America, called for changes to the Trump administration’s proposed regulations on racial nondiscrimination in private schools.

The bishops’ general counsel and the other signatories called on the administration to “limit the rule to invidious discrimination and make explicit that sincerely religious curricular and other decisions by religious schools furthering their religious mission do not violate a fundamental public policy.”

They also described the regulations as “particularly problematic for Catholic schools since a majority of them admit students based on the co-extensive boundaries of the parish churches they serve.”

They explained:

If all trait-conscious assistance could be conflated with discrimination, these non-discriminating churches and their schools may be subject to repeated, resource-intensive inquiries to attempt to prove they are not discriminating.

Of course, no Catholic schools to our knowledge use race or ethnicity for admissions. But where schools draw from homogenous geographic communities, the proposed rule could subject them to charges of discrimination based on the composition of the student body.

More concerning is that the breadth of this new rule makes the line between a religious criterion and an ethnic one the IRS’s to draw and usurps the role of the Church in determining how best to serve its communities.

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