Acontroversial commencement speech, delivered by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker at Benedictine College, has thrust the Catholic institution in Kansas in to the spotlight that is national roiled the world wide web with ideological clashes and stoked ongoing, heated debates within and outside of Catholic greater ed institutions.
benedictine college commencement speech
Perhaps the order of nuns that created and sponsor Benedictine College, the siblings of Mount St. Scholastica, recently weighed in and slammed Butker in a declaration that is public their comments about gender roles.
“One of our concerns ended up being the assertion that being a homemaker may be the highest calling for a woman,” the statement read.
In his May 11 message, Butker hit for a number of conservative speaking points and lamented catholics abortion that is supporting (including President Biden), COVID-19 lockdowns and “dangerous gender ideologies,” among other issues.
“I think it is you, the ladies, who have had the absolute most diabolical lies told to you,” Butker, a Catholic that is conservative graduates. “How many of you are sitting here now, about to cross the stage, and are planning on all the promotions and titles you’re going to get in your career. A number of you may go on to lead careers which are successful the world. But I would venture to guess that nearly all you are most worked up about your marriage and the young children you will bring into this world.”
He stated his wife “would be the very first to say that her life truly began when she began living her vocation as a wife and also as a mother.”
“All of my success is made possible because a lady I came across in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace very important games of all: homemaker,” he added.
Their remarks weren’t especially out of character. Butker gave the commencement message at Georgia Institute of Technology year that is last their alma mater, where he told students this one “antidote” to isolation, loneliness and despair was to “get hitched and commence a household.”
Butker got a standing ovation at Benedictine, and apparently a boos that are few but the reactions by professional athletes, celebrities, pundits, activities fans, teachers, clergy and Catholic female students and academics ranged from accolades to condemnation.
Susannah Leisegang, one associated with the 485 Benedictine graduates said on TikTok, that she and her roomie did and booed n’t stand up.
“You also have to keep in mind this was at a Catholic and college that is conservative” she said. “So, most of the men were like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ They were excited. But it was terrible.”
Kassidy Neuner, another graduate, told the Associated Press Butker’s comments “felt a degrading that is small” noting that males can be homemakers too. (Enrollment data on Benedictine’s website shows females comprised 51.5 percent of pupils in 2022.
“To point this out specifically that that’s what we’re looking ahead to in life seems like our four years of efforts wasn’t really important,” she stated.
Another graduate, ValerieAnne Volpe, praised Butker and told AP News he was messages that are just delivering are frightened to say.” She said she looked at her dad, who was simply into the audience during the speech, was “probably clapping and so happy to see just what he would say is an actual man” with “family values” and “good spiritual upbringing.”
“You can just hear that he loves their wife. You can hear that he loves their family,” she said of Butker.
James Madden, a philosophy professor at Benedictine, expressed dismay in a Substack essay at the vitriol exchanged among onlookers nationally within the aftermath of the message, noting that Butker’s opinions were predictable, because was the outrage that followed.
“And yet, we persist in repeating these cycles of indignation,” he wrote. “One party to the culture war loudly and clearly utters what was loudly and obviously uttered times being many the last. The opponents of such views, dutifully doing their role in the drama, utter a return volley of scorn and hatred. We’ve seen this movie numerous times before, but we keep returning for the worn-out sequels.”
He wrote that the speech it self, and also the conflagration over it, distract from more important issues in and beyond the Catholic Church, such as for example economic strains on working-class families which make subsisting on one income not an selection for numerous couples, and abuse that is sexual inside the church.
The college did respond to requests n’t for comment from Inside Higher Ed and contains thus far stayed silent on the debate. But the sisters of Mount St. Scholastica staunchly condemned the message in their statement on Facebook.
They said that Butker’s comments sowed division and did not “represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested.”
“We siblings have actually dedicated our lives to God and God’s people, including the women which are numerous we have actually taught and influenced during the past 160 years,” the statement read. “These ladies have produced tremendous difference into the world inside their roles as spouses and mothers and through their God-given gift suggestions in leadership, scholarship, and their jobs it means to be Catholic.… we reject a narrow definition of what”
Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a historic Catholic women’s college that is undergraduate Washington D.C., stated she too was left “aghast” by the speech.
“All we have to say to Harrison Butker is, ‘look out in the event that you get the nuns mad at you,’” she said. She noted that the ideal of womanhood expressed in Butker’s message seemingly did include the women n’t who began many Catholic colleges. The bulk that is vast of higher ed institutions were founded by religious requests, including purchases of nuns, who historically served as trustees, administrators and faculty members.
“In insulting females that will work he also type of insulted generations of religious women who built these institutions themselves,” McGuire said. “They built colleges and schools and healthcare centers. And in numerous ways, it had been the nuns whom set the instance for Catholic lay females also to go to work.”
She said suggesting that women should be full-time homemakers is” that is“classist “racist” and noted that females don’t always have the monetary option to be stay-at-home mothers, including lots of women from low-income backgrounds and women of color. Trinity disproportionately serves students of color and pupils that are low-income.
“It’s a message that might resonate with upper middle-class people,” McGuire said of the message. But “it also insults women that are working are also great moms and leaders of families. Millions of women have demonstrated so it’s quite possible become moms that are great great in the workplace.”
She pointed away that Butker’s own mother has had an career that is accomplished. Elizabeth Keller Butker is a physicist that is medical the Department of Radiation Oncology at Emory University and contains worked during the college for over 2 decades.
Massimo Faggioli, a teacher of theology and religious studies at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said he had been surprised the football celebrity was asked to speak at commencement in the destination that is first.
benedictine college commencement speech
He noted that Benedictine is among the more conservative Catholic colleges. It is also among the colleges recognized by the Cardinal Newman Society, an organization that describes it self as existing “to promote and defend faithful education that is catholic and “vigorously vetting Catholic colleges” to make sure their “they have strong policies and standards that uphold Catholic identity from academics and athletics to faculty hiring and campus life.” Faggioli said it wouldn’t be uncommon or unexpected for professors, administrators or speakers to express a view that is conservative gender to pupils at such an organization, but it might have been done more thoughtfully.
Faggioli said the speech did feel that is n’t of the ideological nuance he knows exists on campus. He believes the range of Butker due to the fact commencement speaker had been probably based on the concept that the celebrity appearance is good for the image that is college’s nevertheless the result was just the opposite.
“It’s not strange that some Catholics in the U.S. say these things and think these things,” he said. “It’s surprising that somebody at the college thought it was a proven fact that is good have him address graduates.”
Faggioli thinks the debate must be a training with other colleges and universities that celebrities may never be the most effective speakers to give wisdom to future alumni.
“Choosing most of these speakers can end up making the identity of the college a caricature,” he said. Now Benedictine College is “identified with this kind that is extreme of war Catholicism, which will be not the Catholicism of all students and all faculty at Benedictine.”
As for the nuns’ reaction, he stated their condemnation was “predictable.”
“Nuns don’t want to learn by a guy that is young performs football by what being fully a woman is,” he said.
The controversy over Butker’s speech reflects debates which can be long-simmering and among Catholic colleges and universities and Catholics at large about the direction and future of Catholic higher training, McGuire noted. She highlighted that in 1967, a group of Catholic higher ed leaders arrived out because of the Land O’Lakes statement, a declaration that a Catholic university must be “a university in the complete sense that is modern of word” with academic freedom and autonomy, even from the Catholic Church.
Then, in 1990, Pope John Paul II issued Ex corde Ecclesiae, a directive that espoused his vision for Catholic higher education.
That document spurred another “10 or 15 many years of discussion about what it meant to be Catholic right back then,” McGuire said, “and again, this stress between those whom felt that individuals were too liberal, those who wanted more conservative [values] …” Those tensions have stretched on “for decades” and continue today in debates over all sorts of issues, such as whether a Catholic college can host a speaker in favor of abortion liberties or have an club that is LGBTQ. These are particularly real time debates under Pope Francis, who’s taken a “less judgmental and more caring approach that is LGBTQ+ Catholics, she stated.
Butker “does maybe not speak for the Catholic Church,” McGuire said, “nor does he speak for Catholic higher education.”
