Letter #5, 2025, Wednesday, January 22: Top Ten 2024, #6

    Professional football player in the United States, Harrison Butker.

    Last summer, Butker was attacked when he gave a commencement address at an American college and spoke words of praise about his wife, and about the beauty she had found in being a mother.

    He responded: “You know what, there’s things that I believe wholeheartedly that I think will make this world a better place, and I’m going to preach that. And if people don’t agree, they don’t agree, but I’m going to continue to say what I believe to be true and love everyone along the way.”

    For this courageous witness to what he believes, we chose Butker to be among our “Top Ten” People of 2024. —RM    

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With the aid, and in the hope, of Christ, believers can
overcome any difficulties… 

Here are the testimonies of 10 of His people 

Top Ten 2024

    It was a difficult year. Around the world there were wars and rumors of wars; brutally contentious elections; assassinations and assassination attempts; deadly storms, earthquakes and mudslides. Conflicts within the Church — excommunications, criminal trials, continuing abuse allegations and the tug-of-war between modernism and tradition — were sometimes just as painful.

    Yet the Church is — in a way the world is not — consecrated and filled with grace by her divine Spouse, the Lord Jesus, who ever and always “makes all things new.”

    The grace and peace of Christ is available to all Christians of good will, and in 2024, as in every year, it was the antidote to the sickness of our modern age, and the leavening of our lives otherwise weighed down by the consequences of sin.

    Jesus did indeed, in 2024, somehow renew us and bring us joy and strength, and one way He accomplished this was through the lives and testimonies of His people. We have chosen 10 of them for your reflection here.

    Harrison Butker, Professional NFL Football Kicker

    “I’m going to say what I believe to be true”

    “Be unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men. Do hard things. Never settle for what is easy. You might have a talent that you don’t necessarily enjoy, but if it glorifies God, maybe you should lean into that over something that you might think suits you better. I speak from experience as an introvert who now finds myself as an amateur public speaker and an entrepreneur, something I never thought I’d be when I received my industrial engineering degree…”

    The “introvert” who spoke those words on May 11, 2024, never became an industrial engineer. Harrison Butker, 29, did, however, become a professional football kicker for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, and a holder of field goal records not only in the history of the Chiefs franchise, but in the history of the Super Bowl and of the National Football League.

    Off the field, Butker returned, as an adult, to the Catholic faith he was raised in, and has since become an outspoken defender of traditional morality and his faith in Jesus and the Church He founded. (Butker fans first began to notice he was wearing a brown scapular that occasionally peeked out from under his NFL uniform a couple of years ago.)

    Although Butker caused a bit of a stir when he delivered the commencement address at his alma mater, Georgia Tech, in 2022, telling the graduates to “get married and start a family,” the husband and father of three attracted wider media attention in May 2024 for the commencement address he gave at the Newman Guide-listed Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. In it, he said:

    “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? 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’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation…and embraces one of the most important titles of all: homemaker. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”

    Butker received a standing ovation at the college; the media, however, reacted mostly with censure. Headlines called the talk an “attack on working women.” Others called him a “jerk and a bigot” and, of course, the old stand-bys, “homophobic and sexist,” for also disparaging “LBGTQ” issues, “Pride Month,” abortion and contraception.

    Butker has not been deterred.

    In August 2024, he told the Associated Press, “I feel like, seven years in the league, having this platform, I’ve just decided: You know what, there’s things that I believe wholeheartedly that I think will make this world a better place, and I’m going to preach that. And if people don’t agree, they don’t agree, but I’m going to continue to say what I believe to be true and love everyone along the way.”

    And he has not limited himself to critiquing modern secular culture; he also is an enthusiastic supporter of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).

    Later in his Benedictine College speech, he remarked:

    “I’ve been very vocal in my love and devotion to the TLM and its necessity for our lives. But what I think gets misunderstood is that people who attend the TLM do so out of pride or preference… I do not attend the TLM because I think I am better than others, or for the smells and bells, or even for the love of Latin.

    “I attend the TLM because I believe, just as the God of the Old Testament was pretty particular in how he wanted to be worshiped, the same holds true for us today. It is through the TLM that I encountered order, and began to pursue it in my own life.”

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