I see consistency here even without seeing how the conclusions were reached.
Note that the vision of Catholicism of Georgetown is more secular than the vision of the Newman Society. So given a constant 3rd party vision, the university will see it as less secular. Even if they used the same methodology, it is possible their interpretations could look this way.
I do find it odd that the Register would run this story as they did, without being far more derogatory of Georgetown and of secularism in general. I would have expected a couple sentences about CARA’s study, then the rest of the piece secularism-bashing. (Maybe this is a good thing, if they fix up their journalistic standards they could be one of the best). Even so, still somewhat typical: I had to sigh when reading the snark about being only 1 in 7 institutions or something like that (with the implication that the study is designed poorly and thus not reliable), when in reality, if the sampling was well designed, those numbers could be quite sufficient.