The Kicker

On Harrison Butker and the state of Catholicism

Breaking News: Catholic man accepts invitation to give commencement speech at Catholic school, says Catholic things. Details at 11.

This has unironically been several days’ worth of breaking news in the past week, in reaction to a speech at Benedictine College by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker. Most of the furor has focused on a few anodyne paragraphs in which Butker extols the feminine vocation of marriage and motherhood. Without demeaning women who have “successful careers,” he suggests most of the young women in his audience will be most excited and fulfilled by having families. Here he points to the example of his own wife, who has given him two children and would tell you herself that she wouldn’t trade her life for any career path.

Just for this, Harrison has been branded a “misogynist psycho,” among other choice phrases. “I just hope he is canceled to Hell and back,” rants one charmingly expressive older woman, who pronounces him “the most sexist, white supremacist d*ck I have ever seen in my life” and feels “so sorry that his wife has to sleep with him.” (Methinks she doth protest too much, but let the reader be the judge.) These sorts of reactions were so numerous that even Bill Maher—a man who in his own words has “never held a baby and never will”—couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, in unrelated news, Harrison’s jersey appears to have sold out in women’s sizes.

Based on his “misogynist” remarks, as well as other moments in the speech where Butker expresses standard traditional Catholic positions on issues like abortion, IVF, and gay marriage, the cry has gone up for him to be dismissed. A petition has 100,000 signatures and counting. Even one of the team’s own cheerleaders has joined the shrieking chorus. However, supportive comments from the team owner’s wife would seem to indicate that Butker’s job is secure. This is an interesting rare example of traditional religion holding a strategic outpost in the public square. But not all young trad Catholics are so fortunate, and Butker was no doubt keenly aware of this as he delivered his call to action.

Amusingly, the unhinged older woman who pities Harrison’s wife referred to his speech as an example of “evangelical Christianity.” In her impoverished religious vocabulary, “evangelical” seems to be her catch-all label for “stupid Christian sumbitches somewhere to my political right.” Perhaps this is because in an American context, evangelicals are the Christian voting bloc most commonly associated with conservative values. With Catholics, the associations are more mixed. Which, if you carefully listen to (or read) the entire speech, is exactly Harrison’s point. As a piece of rhetoric, the speech is not primarily an indictment of secular culture. It is an indictment of a hypocritical Church.

One little-discussed key element of the speech is how, like no doubt many commencement speeches this year, it is haunted by the specter of COVID. Or, more precisely, by the catastrophic institutional response to COVID. For a devout young Catholic like Butker, the failures of the Church were an especially profound betrayal. He specifically condemns the cowardly bishops who prevented willing priests from carrying last rites to the dying, thereby communicating “that the sacraments don’t actually matter.” In a time when courageous leadership was most desperately needed, these shepherds chose the way of fear:

We cannot buy into the lie that the things we experienced during COVID were appropriate. Over the centuries, there have been great wars, great famines, and yes, even great diseases, all that came with a level of lethality and danger. But in each of those examples, Church leaders leaned into their vocations and ensured that their people received the sacraments.

Great saints like St. Damien of Molokai, who knew the dangers of his ministry, stayed for 11 years as a spiritual leader to the leper colonies of Hawaii. His heroism is looked at today as something set apart and unique, when ideally it should not be unique at all. For as a father loves his child, so a shepherd should love his spiritual children, too.

On Twitter, I saw some sanctimonious scold fretting about this passage, among others, because he doesn’t want young Catholics “to define the Faith along reactionary, cultural lines.” Yes, we must be “wary of error,” but we must remember that Christianity is primarily “positive” and “joyful.” Meanwhile, he can’t understand why Harrison is going on about “peripheral” stuff like COVID lockdowns, which “finished years ago,” doesn’t everyone know?

This, of course, walks straight into Harrison’s point, which is that he speaks for a generation which desperately wants to believe that things like the Eucharist mean something, and is not at all sure this is what their leaders believe. Today, I stumbled onto a touching little clip of the Catholic president of Poland catching a Eucharist Host as it threatens to blow away in the wind. Once the Host is consecrated, Catholics are to protect it with exactly this sort of care, making sure it’s not lost or wasted. I once read a moving anecdote from World War II about a chaplain who fell in the act of giving a man communion. Racing to recover the body, his colonel took the Host out of the chaplain’s hand and quickly consumed it, which is the standard Catholic protocol if a chaplain dies in combat. To a religious outsider, this might seem like a very strange gesture, but it makes sense if you believe the Eucharist means something.

Butker also laments the way that “too many of our sacred traditions have been relegated to things of the past,” chief among them the Traditional Latin Mass. He cherishes the TLM so much that he challenges his young audience to try to move where it’s readily available. Here, he can’t bring himself to name out loud the greatest Church leadership travesty of all: that Pope Francis hates the TLM as much as Butker loves it. After all, Butker is a conservative, and in the pope’s own recent words, “[A] conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude.”

This point is lost in all the grumbling about “celebrity Catholics” like Butker. Why, asks Luke Burgis, are people so “desperate” to nab a young football star for every conference/podcast/etc. just for saying some trad Catholic stuff in a commencement speech? Why was he giving the commencement speech to begin with? What’s next, canonizing the actor who plays Jesus on TV?

Replying to Luke, I among others suggested what seems obvious, that Butker is striking a chord precisely because the Church’s “official” leadership options are so pathetic. Luke came back to ask, “When is the last time the official leaders were doing a great job providing strong guidance?” I said it at least seems safe to say that John Paul II was better than Francis. I also pointed back to the classic dystopian novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, who to say the least had a fraught relationship with religious faith. Yet he was drawn to Catholicism, and he painted the Catholic Church as the one steady beacon of light in an ever-shifting post-apocalyptic wasteland. That novel was published in 1959, pre-Vatican II. The Latin Mass is hauntingly woven throughout. Miller can’t conceive of a world where the Latin Mass doesn’t exist. It’s just there. It’s always been there. How could it not be?

But Harrison is not merely anti-establishment. He seeks out and praises good leaders where he can find them, including leaders at Benedictine College. This is a poignant image of college president Stephen Minnis on his knees, leading the student body in praying the Rosary. Of course, it could be bitterly pointed out here that various “trad” leaders have also fallen from grace in spectacular fashion. No doubt Harrison would acknowledge that heroes can fall, while still maintaining that it’s good to keep looking for heroes.

Since no one asked, the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica decided to weigh in with their own protest statement, letting us all know that “We reject a narrow definition of what it means to be Catholic. We are faithful members of the Catholic Church who embrace and promote the values of the Gospel, St. Benedict, and Vatican II and the teachings of Pope Francis.” No doubt they would agree with the pope’s definition of a conservative.

But no one seems to have pressed His Holiness on that word “suicidal.” If conservatism is so suicidal, perhaps someone should ask him why Catholic conservatives are, quite literally, replacing Catholic liberals. Perhaps someone should ask him why all the boomer nuns are Team Francis, and all the homemaking moms are Team Harrison. I say this not to be rude about boomer nuns merely for being boomers, or nuns. I merely note that for all X such that X is a boomer nun, X is more likely than not to be squeamish about a “narrow” definition of Catholic orthodoxy. Which is to say, X is more likely than not to be an Episcopalian in Catholic disguise.

If the reaction to Butker’s speech is any indication, a lot of young Catholics are very, very tired of Episcopalianism in Catholic disguise. Harrison points to Democrats like Biden, Pelosi, Fauci, and others as “an important reminder that being Catholic alone doesn’t cut it.” Taking a selfie on Ash Wednesday doesn’t cut it if you’re waving the trans flag on Easter Sunday. Making the sign of the cross doesn’t cut it if you’re doing it during a pro-abortion rally.

Of course, it’s one thing for a Democrat politician to make himself an enemy of Catholic orthodoxy. But what does it mean when the bishops do it? What does it mean when the pope does it? I ask these rather painful questions as a Protestant, with great love and sympathy for my conservative Catholic friends. They field such questions frequently and have various answers for them. It’s not my place to say they have to join me over on my side of the Tiber, though they have an open invitation.

But as long as they’re determined to go on being the best faithful Catholics they can be, I wish them well. And I think they could choose far worse heroes than Harrison Butker.