Reactions to Harrison Butker’s commencement speech abound. Today there are couple of note.
First, at Crisis is a piece by Paul Kengor: “Hell’s Fury for Harrison Butker” subtitled: “If you’re sick of the bullying thugs of cancel culture, then stand with Harrison Butker. Now they’re coming for Butker. Next, they’ll come for you.”
The target audience for the speech, after all, was Catholics. Frankly, the speech ought to have elicited a shrug from non-Catholics who should view it as none of their business. But to the angry intolerants of cancel culture, everything and everyone is their business. Your business is their business. They will follow you, hound you, monitor you. They accept no dissent; they destroy those they disagree with. They howl. They start howling the moment they crawl out of bed and make coffee and flip open their laptop. They look for guys like Butker to destroy.
I can attest that this is active within the Church as well.
Next, there is pure gold from Anthony Esolen at The Catholic Thing: “A Much-Needed Kick in Kansas”
This line was great…
Of course, Butker suggested only what Chesterton suggested long ago, to the effect that modern women rose up and said they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers.
And there are these posers…
Why do we shrug at an 80-hour work week shared between husband and wife, leaving the neighborhood a ghost town for most of the day, all through the year? Where is the multitude of child-rich and happy households with no one at home to see to the needs of the body, let alone to make the freedom of childhood possible? What do we gain from this evisceration of local life, and the institutionalization of small children?
UPDATE:
I can’t not add this. Replace Butker with a female kicker! No, really! What could go wrong?
NEW: The Kansas City Star is calling on the KC Chiefs to fire Harrison Butker and hire a female kicker after Butker advocated for traditional values during a speech.
The opinion piece quickly notified readers that this was “not a joke” and “not unrealistic.”
“For poetic justice… pic.twitter.com/uJxlrUvHpz
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 19, 2024
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Thank you for highlighting two of my favorite writers: Paul Kengor and Anthony Esolen. Our household had managed to ignore most of the kerfuffle over this, seeing it as just the “usual suspects.” But perhaps that is the problem. We welcome the great opportunity to donate to Benedictine College in his name.
Dear Father, I am a 1975 graduate of Benedictine College in Atchison Kansas. I must say with the invitation of Harrison Butker as commencement speaker let me add a very proud graduate of that institution. You might find my history with the school of interest.
When I first entered the college in 1971 it still had a minor religious presence but for the most part it went with the flow of the changing world of that time and fully embraced the Vatican II changes more so with the nuns at Mt. St. Scholastica than the monks at St. Benedicts. This was the first year St. Benedicts and Mt. St. Scholastica merged to form one college called Benedictine. The south campus was the old “mount” campus of the womens school where I spent my first 3 years on campus. The North campus was the former St. Benedicts college where I spent my senior year at Newman hall.
I am ashamed to say that during my high school days at Notre Dame high school for boys in Niles, and college years I pretty much became an apostate Catholic. I fell into the philosophy of the time, do your own thing.
Benedictine was responsible for the one life line God threw me to keep me Catholic. Parents weekend Freshman year the Monastery on North campus got permission from the local Bishop to read a solemn Latin High mass in the monastery church. To this day I get goose bumps thinking of it. 3 priests, an army of altar boys, incense covering the entire church, the beautiful music of one of Schuberts masses. That one day made me a Catholic again thanks to those Benedictine monks. It was my entrance into the TLM and I never looked back.
Somewhere around the early part of this century Benedictine made a full 180 degree turn and began to reaffirm and embrace our Traditional catholic roots. The campus was now concentrated on the old St. Benedicts campus centered around the monastery with new buildings and facilities added constantly. Its academics are second to none. Orthodox Catholicism permeates the campus in every way of life. Yes a very very proud 1975 graduate of Benedictine. Who knows, those monks that one Sunday in 1971 might have just saved this sinners soul.
Before he can be replaced by a female kicker, they’re going to need to define what a female is.
Couldn’t help but notice the female kicker ran straight off the playing field after making the kick. No down field tackles or mixing it up as a male kicker would do.
As for the young man at the Benedictine University my thoughts are essentially these:
“Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” John 4:35 Look how rapturous these young Catholics were to hear the Truth at last, albeit a snippet. People are utterly famished for the Word of God and this young man (akin to Stephen) was fearless.
A friend attended the Benedictine graduation ceremonies. Something that doesn’t make it into the news: Mr. Butker received a standing ovation.
As Rudyard Kipling said in his excellent poem “The Female of the Species,” a woman “must command but may not govern.” The most powerful person in the world is a good stay at home mother. As Jean Meyer, the most prominent historian of the Cristero revolt in Mexico noted: the brave and daring machista Cristero soldiers were all Mama’s boys who left to fight because their mothers and sisters called them cowards to their face if they didn’t. The same can be said of all the gallant Polish soldiers who were pushed to fight by their patriotic mothers. In fact, in every Polish parish in Poland or the US, all alter servers are male (unless the priest is some wacky liberal, which is very rare) and no Polish Catholic woman ever argues for priestesses. Yet when you look at a Polish and American home, one can see that the Polish woman dominates her home much more than most liberated American women do. The liberal women argue for woman authority in the workplace because they have no authority. They end up living with cats or dogs because those are the only beings that will ever obey them.