K ansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker delivered Benedictine College’s commencement speech this year. It has since gone viral, supposedly for promoting “antiquated” gender roles.
Benedictine is a small, Catholic liberal-arts school in Kansas. Its students and faculty have traditional beliefs; above all, the college says on its website, a Benedictine student is “Christ-centered,” faithful, steadfast, and committed to greatness. Previous commencement speakers have all placed great emphasis on the importance of a Catholic education: Catholic lawyer Leonard Leo spoke to students last year, and the year before, Bishop Robert Barron spoke. Butker was one of the college’s younger, lesser-known speakers, and he followed the school’s trend of commencement speakers who, in the name of faith, contribute to the world’s cultural or political discourse.
There is now an ongoing attempt to “cancel” Butker for this message that he delivered to female students:
For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing achievement. You should be proud of all that you have achieved at this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now, about to cross this stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.
I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and a mother. I am on this stage and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. . . . It cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife and embrace one of the most-important titles of all: homemaker.
Butker is a traditional Catholic, speaking to a traditionally Catholic audience, so it’s no surprise that his speech was well received and applauded on campus. Others haven’t taken to it as kindly. USA Today columnist Mike Freeman wrote that “Butker represents a segment of the population that wants to go backwards, particularly with women’s rights,” adding that “the goal is to wrench power from a society that has become more pluralistic and diverse, and put it back into the hands of a small group of men.” Brook Schwartz, the wife of Butker’s former teammate Mitchell Schwartz, lambasted the kicker’s comments by posting on Instagram, “What in the Handmaid’s Tale is this crap,” adding, “I value and respect whatever a woman chooses for her life. But it is NEVER, EVER a man’s place to tell women what their roles are.” The NFL itself felt the need to issue a statement clarifying that Butker spoke only in his personal capacity and that the league is “steadfast” in its “commitment to inclusion.”
The basic premise of Butker’s speech — that men and women should prioritize their respective vocations — is a wonderful message for recent graduates. It’s noble to encourage young Catholics to get married, have children, and be spiritual leaders in an anti-Catholic world. That said, getting married, having children, and being a homemaker is not a vocation every woman desires or pursues. Nor is it an easily achievable one. Nor is it the right one for every woman.
One hopes that men like Butker who think advice to “get married, have babies” is sage and straightforward also understand that it’s not that easy. Women who suffer infertility, women who haven’t yet met a compatible spouse, women whose household incomes do not allow them to stay at home are not lesser women or lesser Catholics. It’s unhelpful to treat a woman’s life before she has children or a husband (if she does) as a period of limbo. Life is an opportunity to glorify God in every season.
God’s design for women — what Pope John Paul II called the “feminine genius” — doesn’t confine them to the household. Quite the opposite. Women and men should prioritize raising and educating children, if they are lucky enough to marry and to conceive or adopt. But parents are not called to retreat into private life. “Women will increasingly play a part in the solution of the serious problems of the future: leisure time, the quality of life, migration, social services, euthanasia, drugs, health care, the ecology, etc.,” Pope John Paul II wrote in his Letter to Women in 1995.
In all these areas a greater presence of women in society will prove most valuable, for it will help to manifest the contradictions present when society is organized solely according to the criteria of efficiency and productivity, and it will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favours the processes of humanization which mark the “civilization of love.”
Why is it a diabolical lie, as Butker put it, to dream about what one might do with her education? Benedictine is America’s only Catholic college to have a Nobel Peace Laureate: Wangari Maathai, the “woman of trees,” who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for “her contributions to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Maathai started the Green Belt Movement to address poverty in Kenya, helped plant 40 million trees, and was the first African woman to be awarded the prize. She also had three children. A successful career like Maathai’s doesn’t make for a wasted or less holy life.
For as much truth as the Church bestows, it allows for a fair bit of nuance. Butker also claimed in the speech that “no matter how you spin it, there is nothing natural about Catholic birth control.” That’s not true: In Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, the Church makes clear that
if . . . there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.
Butker also referenced recent legislation, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, that would require the Department of Education to classify antisemitism on college campuses pursuant to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism: “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail,” he claimed. That’s not true. The definition supports — as Nostra Aetate did in 1965 and as Pope Benedict XVI did years later — that “Temple aristocracy,” not the Jews as a collective people, is to blame for Jesus’s crucifixion. (And, really, the most Catholic answer to the question of who killed Jesus is, “I did.”) The categorical blame of Jews for Jesus’s death caused centuries of Christian antisemitism. Thank God that Church leaders clarified that such despicable teaching justifies theological persecution and is therefore unacceptable.
Hitting on gender roles, birth control, and the Jews certainly made for an inflammatory speech that stirred a backlash from the internet’s anti-Christian, anti-family audience. The controversy is absurd, especially given that other NFL players guilty of sexual assault or racism get free passes and never get canceled. But delivery matters, and Butker’s comments about women seem ill designed if his goal was to convert hearts and uplift women.
Contrast that with Pope John Paul II, who glorified a woman’s propensity for compassion, generosity, sensitivity, and motherhood — and clarified that a woman’s dignity is inherent, not derived from her position as either a CEO or a homemaker, but from her role as Christ’s daughter.
One more note. On the mention of Butker’s wife, Isabelle, this from Humanae Vitae is worth reflection: “Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.”