Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker gave one of the most courageous and countercultural commencement addresses in recent memory at Benedictine College last week, and naturally the legacy media are smearing him for it.
Butker, who has won three Super Bowls with the Chiefs and kicked the game-winning field goal in the 2023 Super Bowl, has never shied away from sharing his Catholic faith publicly. In his commencement address to the class of 2024 at Benedictine College, he spoke more about how his Catholic faith informs and guides his daily life and that of his family, including the fact that his wife is a homemaker.
“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you,” he said. “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 her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”
Butker would go on to condemn abortion, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization, things that are expressly condemned as grave moral evils by the Catholic Church, as he addressed the graduates who attended a Catholic college. He also singled out pride as a particularly “deadly sin.”
“I am certain the reporters at the AP could not have imagined that their attempt to rebuke and embarrass places and people like those here at Benedictine wouldn’t be met with anger, but instead with excitement and pride. Not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it,” Butker said, referring to an Associated Press article that profiled Benedictine as a haven of conservative Catholicism. “But the true God-centered pride that is cooperating with the Holy Ghost to glorify him.”
The Athletic, the Associated Press, and USA Today were just some of the media outlets to pile on the Chiefs kicker and demand the team respond to its player’s commencement speech. One writer at USA Today proclaimed that Butker “wants to go backwards, particularly on women’s rights,” and insinuated that the kicker also harbors racist views. Butker made no mention of race in his remarks.
For the legacy media, there are two villains in this story. The first is Butker, whose status as an NFL player gives him a platform and public image that ensures that his adherence to traditional Catholicism is spread to a wider audience and undermines the secular puritanism for which the legacy media so feverishly advocate.
The Chiefs kicker did not say that women had to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. All he did was note the fact that many women graduating from Benedictine will choose to be wives and mothers first, and that this vocation should be honored and celebrated. This is hardly a controversial statement for anyone who knows anything about the life goals of Benedictine students. Also missing in most of the media coverage of the speech was Butker’s reflection on his own vocation and focus on how he “can be a better father and husband.”
But the second villain is Benedictine College. Butker addressed the largest graduating class this Catholic school in Atchison, Kansas, has ever seen. At a time when enrollment at most colleges and universities is declining, schools such as Benedictine, which offer a traditional and often deeply religious approach to education, are defying the national trends and growing.
In its report on Butker’s address, the Athletic saw fit to remind readers that in 2014, a student basketball player was told by administrators that a pride flag in his dorm window violated the school’s code of conduct and had to be removed. Such an anecdote was only included as a means to paint the institution as infested by kooky and bigoted religious zealots and undermine its public image.
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But these attacks misunderstand why Benedictine and other schools like it, such as Hillsdale College, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Ave Maria University, are thriving. These schools are thriving because of the very fact that moral formation, grounded in the Christian tradition, is at the center of the education offered at these institutions.
Butker spoke to the hearts of Benedictine’s class of 2024 because he understands what the institution stands for and why those graduates chose to attend this small Catholic school. His courageous speech will no doubt inspire more young men and women to seek out institutions of higher education that recognize the inescapable reality that sound moral character is at the heart of any education that sees human flourishing as its end. If recent years are any indication, Benedictine College will welcome its largest freshman class ever this fall. With Butker’s publicity boost, it might be even bigger than expected.