Catholic World News - December 22, 2014
The Cardinal Newman Society (CNS), a Virginia-based group that works to protect Catholic identity in Catholic colleges and universities, has warmly welcomed a decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which ruled last week that a college’s claim to religious identity should be judged according to whether individual employees perform religious functions.
In recent years the NLRB has involved itself in the hiring decisions of faith-based schools, devising complicated criteria to judge whether a particular hiring decision is protected by religious-freedom claims. But in a noteworthy decision last week the NLRB said that the relevant criterion should be whether the employees perform religious funcitnos .
“For the most part, this is a huge victory for The Cardinal Newman Society, religious colleges and all who have challenged the NLRB’s violations of religious freedom over the past 25 years,” said Patrick Reilly, the president of the Cardinal Newman Society. He pointed to the NLRB’s recognition that it “must not impinge on a university’s religious rights .”
The NLRB ruling should prompt a conversation on whether every professor at a Catholic college or university fulfills a religious function, CNS said. The group welcomed that conversation, pointing to the teaching of Ex Corde Ecclesiae that any instructor at a Catholic university should be held responsible for maintaining and promoting the institution’s Catholic identity.