America magazine ran this interesting take on Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker’s immensely controversial Benedictine College commencment speech.I’d like to recommend it to readers of Where Peter Is to supplement other perspectives on Butker’s speech in the Catholic press, especially to supplement ones that are (rightly) criticial or condemnatory. The author, David Mills, is an editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Here is his conclusion:
Mr. Butker could have given a good commencement address that might have said something useful to different people. He could have encouraged and challenged the kinds of American Catholics who like culture-warring addresses, and challenged and encouraged those who don’t. He could at least have made the latter see how his life made sense to people like him as an expression of Catholicism’s good news.
But he didn’t. He gave the kind of talk he was capable of giving, on an occasion that required more wisdom and maturity than he has—and more than he should have been expected to have.
What commended Harrison Butker as a commencement speaker, besides the accidental combination of his minor fame as a football player and his traditionalist Catholicism? Why did the college ask him, except to enjoy the benefits of his celebrity? They put him in a position he should not have been put in. For that, they should apologize to him.
I am sure he doesn’t care now. I certainly wouldn’t have, had I had his success. But he may care, he should care, when he’s older and has learned more about life and the world, and thinks about how much good he could have done if someone had helped him speak more wisely.
I had a piece on Butker that I wrote myself, which I’ve now decided is not going to see the light of day. It isn’t as nice to him as Mills’s piece is, and I stand by that in that I don’t really think Butker needs me to be or would have benefited from me being nice to him; he said some reprehensible things that the Catholic chattering classes have mostly been too skittish about criticizing. The sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism that were either covertly or overtly present in his speech are all inexcusable. In fact, I’m going to be blunter, in Butker’s own style, and say that Mills has not convinced me, at least not fully, that Butker deserves the very charitable treatment of his motives that this article gives him.
Yet the Catholic press shouldn’t always give people what they “deserve,” because “giving people what they deserve” is not, as Pope Francis might say, the “style” of God. Sometimes the “style” of God is doing one’s best to believe that someone one greatly dislikes must have, at least from their own point of view, sympathetic reasons for their offensive or aggravating words or deeds. Mills does a very good job of sketching out what that might look like in this case.
One hopes Mills is right that an older and wiser Butker will wish that he had not exposed such unpleasant views on this stage. It’s possible; I think there is a certain more-Catholic-than-thou immaturity-in-faith to a lot of what he said, and that’s something that can be and usually is outgrown. Then again, I don’t know this guy and might be psychoanalyzing him unduly. So might Mills. All the same, I think that this interesting and compassionate essay is well worth a read.
Image: Harrison Butker. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution. He works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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