By now you have heard Kansas City Chiefs Kicker, Harrison Butker’s recent commencement address to Benedictine College. I was profoundly blessed to graduate from Benedictine College, a small Catholic, liberal-arts school on the bluffs of the Missouri river in 2022 with a bachelors degree in theology. I was excited to see Butker, who has had a growing relationship with the college for a while now, set to speak to the graduating class of 2024. To my dismay, the speech was used to smear my college and a man who was giving a speech on a Catholic campus to Catholic students on Catholic beliefs. Furthermore, it was clipped into bits without context, aiming to inflame and enrage the general public.
Butker addresses the audience with encouragements on motherhood and fatherhood (which has been woefully disregarded in the discourse online). He then spoke about how his wife has fulfilled the vocation that she was called to. He emphasized the goodness and importance of motherhood and noted that it has been attacked in the culture for quite a long time. While speaking about his love and admiration for his wife, he choked up. He also spoke extensively about the need for fathers in the home and the importance of men fulfilling their duties as fathers. The Catholic Church teaches that men and women are called to fatherhood and motherhood, either spiritually or physically.
The graduates of Benedictine have been equipped with substantial knowledge of Catholic Church teachings ans ethics. Many have a degree in theology and are able to parse Butker’s speech to assess what in it is true and what might need clarification.
His speech was not given to evangelize or to change minds, but rather to encourage Benedictine students on their paths forward. As a student at Benedictine, I was never discouraged from getting my degree, finding a job, or having ambitions and dreams. I was in Gregorian Fellows, a leadership program whose goal is to create men and women leaders equipped to go out into the world. We were taught about the greatness of family life as well as the importance of evangelization.
Many graduating students were choosing careers that would allow them to be parents in the future. I gained an understanding of family life that showed you can choose a job that benefits your family as well as your community. I was blessed to have an artist mother who worked part-time as an art teacher and who chose to work at her kids’ schools, so she was able to teach art to her kids and her community.
Butker, to his credit, emphasized the value and power of motherhood, fatherhood, and family life that too few are able to see. Benedictine teaches its students the motto from the late Pope Benedict XVI: “You were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness.”