I'd heard about the speech, but boy...he's got some wild stuff in there.
He seems to have forgotten who was President during the year of the pandemic lockdowns, and it is notable that he called it "the COVID fiasco." It was indeed a fiasco due to Trump's mishandling of the situation, and I'm gonna guess he hasn't gotten his latest booster shot.
He then lays directly into Biden over abortion, but not an unkind word about the serial philanderer who almost certainly paid to end a few unwanted pregnancies. He has an...interesting take on a Martin Scorsese passion project (an excellent film he probably didn't even watch) and seems to have missed that whole long history of his church abusing children and covering it up.
Then he says that the Catholic faith - led by an incredibly rich and powerful institution that ruled large parts of Europe for awhile and engaged in centuries of wars and crusades - "...has always been countercultural." A hot take to be sure.
Then he goes on a long and winding ramble about priests, and the takeaway seems to be that a priest should be viewed as our superiors, saying "The bishops and priests appointed by God as our spiritual fathers must be rightly ordered." Yes, they made some mistakes along the way, but that's just because they were afraid of being sued or prosecuted for things like...oh...I dunno...decades and decades of child molestation. Oh, and yes, lots of people died in the many plagues that happened while the Catholic church was a de facto empire, but the real tragedy is that so many of those died without receiving the sacraments. Oh...the horror.
He wraps up that section - where he complains about the lack of leadership at length - by saying "Focusing on my vocation while praying and fasting for these men will do more for the Church than me complaining about her leaders."
Then comes the part that has been getting all the attention from the evil, liberal media, where he tells the female students that they wasted their money getting an education but they can make up for that mistake by spending the rest of their lives serving a husband and popping out new Catholics. And you young men out there? Don't be a wuss! You must be a manly man who only gets on his knees when there's a priest present! Then he ends with demanding more fealty to church authority, and exhorts the students to go out in the world and find a place where there's a good, traditional, ultra-conservative parish.
I thought commencement speeches were supposed to contain a little bit more encouragement to graduating students about to go out into the world. I know there's no rebuttal given to commencement speeches, but if I had the chance, I'd encourage them to watch Hitchens deliver a "Hitch-slap" to the Catholic Church. I'm guessing Butker hasn't seen it.
