The recent Benedictine College commencement speech delivered by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, an outspoken Catholic, has stirred much controversy over the past week — in no small part due to consistent, willful misinterpretations and even misquotes of the football star’s rousing exhortation extolling the virtues of both motherhood and fatherhood. One particular (and unsurprising) target of feminists’ ire has been Butker’s devotion to the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). One such feminist was Sara Haines, a professional chatterbox on The View.

In her diatribe, Haines alleged that Butker is “not just a devout Catholic.” She continued, “This is someone who’s practicing something called the Traditional Latin Mass, which is divergent from the majority of Catholics. It’s compared to being cult-like and extremist, like some religions in the Middle East and Asia. So this is a very extreme religion.” (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: The Bogeyman: The Leftists’ Hatred of the Catholic Church)

The first claim proffered by Haines, that the TLM is “divergent from the majority of Catholics,” is demonstrably weak, so she isn’t starting out well. What is today referred to often as the TLM (but also called the Tridentine Mass or the Extraordinary Form of the Mass) is simply the Mass that Catholics have been celebrating for over a century. The earliest references to this particular form of the Mass are found in the writings of the late sixth-century Pope St. Gregory the Great. Nearly a thousand years later at the Council of Trent, Pope St. Pius V formalized and standardized the Roman rite of the Mass. The name “Tridentine” is derived from the Council of Trent. This form of the Mass was the most commonly celebrated liturgy right up until the 1970s, when Pope St. Paul VI introduced the Novus Ordo Mass.

In the 1960s, the English Catholic author Evelyn Waugh wrote in defense of the TLM:

This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. Saint Augustine, St. Thomas à Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us…. Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion.

In short, over a thousand years’ worth of Catholics attended and celebrated the TLM. Martyrs died for that Mass. They are just as much a part of the Catholic Church (in Catholic theology, they are called the Church Triumphant) as those now sojourning across the face of the earth (called the Church Militant). Haines later insisted that only “a small, small percentage” of Catholics attend the TLM, but the ranks of Heaven insist otherwise.

Haines then levels further allegations against Catholics devoted to the ancient form of the liturgy: cultishness and extremism. As far as extremism is concerned, the professional chatterbox is correct in declaring Catholicism “a very extreme religion.” The life and death of Christ Himself is evidence of this, compounded by the lives of countless saints and deaths of countless martyrs. Catholicism is not a hobby, it is not a field of study, it is an all-encompassing, all-consuming sacrifice. As the Catholic Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor put it, “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”

As for the allegation of being “cult-like,” this also just may be true, but it would be no truer of Catholics or TLM attendees than of anyone else. In a way, everyone is in a cult and everyone offers worship. In the TLM, worship is offered to God; the faithful present join their minds and souls and bodies to the expiating sacrifice of Christ crucified and offer themselves entirely to God. Other cults worship sex, worship money, worship self. In some, sacrifice consists of morals or principles, family or friends, and sometimes even the lives of innocent children, offered on the altar of abortion. So everyone is in a cult, really, it just happens that Catholicism is the right cult.

Not content with trying to demonize the age-old faith held by Butker and countless others, Haines concluded:

What bothers me about that, as a Christian, is that when people abuse Christianity, they often not only cherry-pick from the Bible, they misinterpret and lie by omission, by taking out parts that would have explained something a little better. So what I can say to [Butker], as a Christian, is if you’re using this [presumably Christianity] to oppress a people or hold them down, you’re not walking with Jesus. If you are more obsessed with the religious rituals and practices than you are with the word of Jesus, then you’re not walking with Jesus. And if you’re using it for the judgement of others and as a weapon to beat people down, you’re also not walking with Jesus. So I would really encourage [Butker], really encourage him to find the best parts of faith and not diverge into extremist beliefs.

What began with stoking fear against something ancient and not at all understood quickly devolved into pernicious accusations of lying, oppressing, obsessing, and weaponizing. Once again, such accusations are nothing new to Catholics. The Catholic Church boldly declares that she alone holds the fullness of Christian truth, and Haines simply serves to remind us that those who reject or depart from truth have little else to guide them. But what we recognize as an inerrant guide, truth, is resented as a restraint by those who reject it.

This rejection and resentment of truth is why Catholics were persecuted by the Jews and Romans in the first centuries after Christ’s death and resurrection; it is why we were oppressed by medieval heretics and tortured by medieval Muslims; it is why English priests were hunted down and hanged under the reign of Elizabeth I; it is why French revolutionaries beheaded bishops; it is why communist agitators desecrated the graves of nuns and lined priests up before the firing squad; it is why Hitler and Stalin tossed Catholics into their camps and gulags; and it is why the secular culture of the 21st century treats Catholics with such rabid disdain. (READ MORE: Speak Boldly, Not Softly: Pope Francis and the Absence of Moral Clarity)

Of course Haines will deride Catholic truth as “oppressive.” It is oppressive, in the same way that a railing on a high balcony is oppressive to those who wish to leap to their deaths. For his part, Butker seems to have found the “best parts of faith,” and just like those who have gone before him championing the best parts of faith, he is facing the wrath of a world that does not want to be burdened and oppressed by truth.