In the nearly two weeks of controversy surrounding Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker's commencement speech at Benedictine University in Atchison, Kansas, one of the most useful commentaries came from Kevin Tierney, writing for Catholic World Report. Tierney neither defended nor attacked Butker's indictments of modern secular culture and lukewarm Catholic faith. Instead, he identified the kicker's worldview as part of a distinctive trend that Tierney calls “DIY traditionalism,” a form of Catholic piety that “places an extreme emphasis on personal responsibility, is populist in nature, and has little direct connection to church authority.”
For a little background, Butker is a Latin Mass Catholic and a teammate of Travis Kelce. Benedictine University is a conservative Catholic university that was featured prominently in a recent Associated Press report about the rightward shift in Catholic faith and practice in the United States. The most controversial part of Kicker's commencement speech, which made the jump from social media to “The View,” was when he urged the university's female graduates to ignore the “satanic lie” that values ”promotions and titles” over “marriage and bringing children into the world.”
But the speech wasn't just about defending “one of the most important job titles: housewife” while denouncing the “decadent cultural values” of society as a whole. Butker also called the Church's bishops weak-kneed bureaucrats, especially for canceling Mass and disappearing from the lives of their faithful during the pandemic. He criticized priests for getting too “familiar” with their parishioners. “As my teammate's girlfriend says, familiarity breeds contempt.”
He seemed to criticize not only the use of artificial contraception but also the use of natural family planning, a church-approved method of fertility regulation. (“There is nothing natural about Catholic contraception, no matter how you interpret it.”) He urged Catholics to prioritize the traditional Latin Mass over other aspects of Catholic life, “even if the parish is not beautiful, the priest is not great, the community is not great.” And while lay Catholics should not all be amateur theologians, he argued that they should not be afraid to go looking for teachings that are not available from the current clergy: “We have so many great resources at hand that it doesn't take long to find traditional, timeless teachings that haven't been vaguely reworded for modern times.”
Just a few weeks ago, when I wrote about the future of the Catholic Church and the Associated Press article, I commented on the tendency in journalism to lump together different kinds of right-wing Catholics, instead of recognizing how a conservative American Catholic who prays the rosary, votes against abortion and reveres Pope John Paul II is different from the typical devotee of the traditional Latin Mass.
A certain amount of this collapse of categories is tolerable when assessing national trends — as I do when imagining a broader “neo-traditionalism” in American religion — but Butker’s speech is a good example of what the difference looks like and why it matters.
When I think of conservative Catholics, even in this age of disillusionment, I am thinking of a category of faithful who are comfortable with hierarchy and authority, who trust their priests and bishops, who may have doubts about the current pope but who perhaps view him favorably (as do the nearly two-thirds of American Catholics who vote Republican), who may be more or less picky about their parish but do so within the bounds of local choice, and who donate generously to the archbishop's annual fundraiser.
You are thinking of a population that holds onto old-fashioned Catholic beliefs like Eucharist adoration, but that have been largely integrated into post-Vatican II liturgical life, that celebrates Mass in English with a touch of Latin accent here and there, and that includes a large number of stay-at-home moms and homeschoolers, who take the juggling of work and family life for granted and for whom someone like Amy Coney Barrett is as exemplary as a stay-at-home mom.
Traditionalism, by contrast, begins with a fundamental and primordial alienation: the belief that in the 1960s the Church establishment suppressed the “essential” form (Butker's words) of the Church's liturgy. Liturgy is the form in which God Himself wishes to be worshipped. This creates a relationship of distrust that does not exist for conservatives. After such knowledge, is there any forgiveness? Can we fully trust a pope or bishops who make such errors?
As Tierney writes in his essay, alienation from institutions also makes practical differences in how this kind of Catholic culture works. Adherents of the traditional Latin Mass are often unable to operate through the normal channels of Catholic life; they cannot show up at the parish and participate in its programs, or cooperate and follow the priest's vision. Instead, traditionalists often have to create subcultures that operate more independently. Tierney describes one example of that process:
“TLM communities want to take root within their parishes and spread the news about TLM. In addition to advertising their own community, an individual will go to a neighboring parish and ask the priest if he can celebrate one TLM there as a consideration for the faithful. The priest doesn’t even have to recite the TLM, but he would be happy to attend the social afterwards. If the priest agrees, he will call up some local priests he knows who will come and say Mass. If they need to learn how to do it, he will contact an association or group of lay people who will train priests to recite the TLM. They will then provide the priest with YouTube videos or hold private training sessions, often at their own expense.
“To promote that Mass, they contact a few key people in the area, send emails, post on social media, and they spread the word in their own communities. Not only do people from that area participate, but those communities send ‘delegations’ from their communities to answer questions and introduce people to what they have found to be most effective in their communities. Perhaps at this point the parish priest has advertised in the parish newsletter, but that newsletter is not widely read and most of the people who participate in that community are not from that parish. Once that Mass has been said, the cycle is set up in another parish, people who want to help are identified, and the cycle begins anew.”
Two points are worth making about this explanation. First, this kind of church-within-a-church dynamic is the very justification for church authorities' attempts to suppress or limit access to the traditional liturgy (attempts that include limiting advertising in parish bulletins): the fear is that the traditional Mass will give rise to sects of believers operating without regular church oversight, and then recruit believers from within the much larger conservative Catholic population into the marginalized camp, for example through traditionalist graduation speeches at conservative universities.
Even Tierney, who is generally sympathetic to traditionalists, describes their movement as “dynamic but chaotic” and that it could “go off track without sufficient corrective mechanisms.” If you are completely unsympathetic to the desire to preserve the old liturgy and view traditionalism as completely outdated, you would see it, as many of Pope Francis' allies do, as a dangerous divisive force within the Church.
But here's the second point, and the great irony: the kind of lay-led organizing I mentioned above, with ordinary Catholics coming together to create culture and community without priestly guidance or hierarchical direction, was exactly what Vatican II was trying to introduce. And if one were to give only a general description of the TLM movement, it could easily be classified as “progressive” — the assumption being that if a bunch of lay Catholics are coming together, crossing parish and diocesan boundaries, and doing things the hierarchy doesn't approve of, then they must be seeking a more liberal, modern Church.
In reality, traditionalism itself has proven to be one of the most successful movements of the entire post-Vatican II era, using one manifestation of the zeitgeist (poignant, populist, anti-authoritarian) to organize against another (liturgical renewal). Traditionalism thrived with the advancement of the internet, which made community building easier and gave traditionalists instant, archival access to the pre-1960s Catholic heritage they long to restore. And it has proven to be a very American movement, emanating from where the heartland meets NFL celebrity culture, in this case. (It is no coincidence that another center of traditionalism is France, a revolutionary country whose Catholic Church has always had a complicated relationship with Rome.)
Butker's critical zeal helps us see how traditionalism limits itself. But the idea that traditionalism is simply a kind of atavism, an inexplicably preserved medieval relic, misunderstands the nature of its strength. Like progressive forms of Catholicism, Butker and his movement are the product of a weakened hierarchy, a disillusioned but empowered laity, and a democratic era.
