Dwight A. Moody, in The Meetinghouse
An Interview with Dr. Tory Baucum
Director of the Center for Family Life
Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas
Thursday, June 6, 2024
Transcribed and edited by Dr. Dwight A. Moody
TB: I came here in 2020 as the founding director of the Center of Family Life. It was the cusp of the Covid pandemic. You might think of the Center as having concentric circles of mission. We have three pillars of the center: Family Restoration, because there is locally a large community of poor people; Family Formation in the Midwest; and Family Exploration worldwide, especially through our patron saint, John Paul II. That involves studying the writings of John Paul II but also taking students, our fellows, to Poland. Those are our three pillars.
DM: The big event several weeks ago was the regular Benedictine College commencement. The school has about 2200 students with more than 400 graduating that day. Were you at the commencement event?
TB: Yes, I was. I am not always. I was supposed to be speaking at Oxford University, but that engagement got moved, so I was here. This was the first one I’ve been to.
DM: Were you aware, as you sat there and listened to the speech, that it was a controversial speech?
TB: Let me pull the lens out just a bit. Commencement was just one of a series of events that day. The college is a serious Catholic college: daily mass, roseries, and a high percentage of the students participate in all that. We started with a morning mass, we had roseries and processions, then we ended up in the gym for the commencement proper. Harrison Butker was participating in all of that, to my knowledge. This is not his first visit to our campus and is a known entity. As I listened to it, I felt like there might be some blowback. I did not think very many people would be paying attention. It is like somebody coming into your congregation, then broadcasting it on Fox News.
DM: He was not a stranger to the community and what he said was not surprising to you or the school officials?
TB: I would not say that, because I am still relatively new to the college, and I am not sure what is surprising and what is not. There is a spectrum of responses. I sent you the bishop’s letter, and I sent you the nuns’ letter. You will see there is a spectrum here. The bishop said, “What he said was consistent with Catholic teaching, and he had a right to say it.” The sisters said, “He shouldn’t have said it.” That is our spectrum here. Benedictine is a big tent. Butker is a Latin Rite Catholic. I suspect most of your listeners and readers will not be familiar with that language. It is like the King James Bible Baptists. There is a sector of that here. There are not many Latin mass Catholics around here. I know of only one professor here who is Latin Mass.
DM: There is a Latin mass available in Atchison?
TB: No, this friend of mine goes up to St. Joe. I think there is occasionally a Latin mass on campus, but I don’t go to Latin mass so I don’t pay attention. My point is that a number of things Harrison articulated a lot of our folks would not necessarily salute, but I would say that it is in the zone of Catholic life in America and the College wants to stay in that zone.
DM: You mentioned his right to say these things. I certainly concur with these things. The commentary I have read and heard about this speech affirm that this man had the freedom and the right to say these things. I don’t think that has been challenged and contested by anybody.
TB: That is not true. A lot of people have contended that he should not have said it. We have had thousands of phone calls. Little old ladies have been reduced to tears listening to every version of the F word. It has been pretty aggressive, pretty ugly, not at all tolerant. That is sometimes the case with intolerant people. They want tolerance but only for themselves. It is not accurate to say that most people said he has a right to say that. Most people have said, “You don’t have the right to say that, and we are going to make sure you will never say it again.” That is closer to the truth.
DM: Do you have a sense that Harrison is welcomed back to the campus? Would you invite him to one of your events?
TB: We do a family camp here on campus each year. I interview couples every year, Catholic couples, about their marriage and their life. We always have variety. We had a Coptic couple this year, from Wichita, because Wichita has an amazing ecumenical comm2unity. I would invite Harrison and Isabella to come. In fact, if Harrison is watching or listening to this broadcast: “I invite you to come and be a part of our next family week.”
DM: I do think it would be interesting for them to sit down with others and have a conversation about these things. As you know, I wrote a commentary about the speech. I was struck by the steady stream of criticism Butker had toward, not only modern secular life, but also the Roman Catholic Church culture. He talked about “the great lie” to men and women, he made a reference to “emasculated masculinity.” I have no idea what he was talking about. Then he talked to women. But he reserved a good bit of his criticism for the Catholic Church. Did this strike you as odd?
TB: I am not going to throw him or the college under the bus. You have known me for many years. I am theologically conservative but politically moderate. For the record, I did not vote for Trump, nor will I ever vote for Trump. But I was intrigued because he is an NFL football player. He kicks! I was not expecting finesse. I knew he was devout. Did I expect him to name people? No. As you know, I did teach preaching and other things when I was a Protestant. I would always tell clergy, “Don’t name names.” not in the pulpit. It reminds me of the story, of the early 19th Scottish preachers Andrew Bonar and Robert McChayne. He was in his 20s. They would always meet on Mondays to discuss their sermons. One day, Robert asked Andrew, “What did you preach on the sabbath?” Andrew responded, “I preached on the text in the Psalms, ‘the wicked shall be cast into hell if they forget God.’” Robert looked at him and said, “Did you preach it with a sob in your voice?” Harrison had a sob in his voice when he talked about his wife. It was the most powerful part of the speech. If he could have had a sob in his voice when he talked about other folks, it would have been a very different speech.
DM: I agree with that.
TB: Was it artful? No. But his own bishop said it was within the frame of Catholic teaching. Were people shocked that Catholic people believe this? We are pro-marriage, pro-family, and pro-life. They should not have been surprised, because this is what the Catechism teaches. If people were paying attention to the Pope’s interview with Norah O’Donnell a couple of weeks ago, he came across a lot more conservative when he had no North American media filter. He said, “I can not bless homosexual unions. That is not possible. I can bless people.” Harrison Butker and Pope Francis overlap, on a Venn diagram, about 95%. Non-Catholics don’t understand the teaching of Catholic Church, so that is one issue.
The other issue was the delivery. Some people have criticized that. Everybody has the right to their own opinion on that one.
DM: Yes, there are many who would describe themselves as pro-marriage, pro-family, and pro-life, but he came across with this message to college students: to the women, forget the career, go home and have babies. This is what he said, the way it came across.
TB: Let me say about that first point. He did not say that you should go home and have babies. The first thing he said was that many of you will have careers. And you will advance. He acknowledged that. He did not say it was a bad but a good. Even Bill Mahar, who is not a strong advocate for the Catholic Church, said, “I do not see a problem here. It is where most Americans used to be, and why can’t some still be there.” I agree with that 100%. I was there and I heard that. When Elizabeth and I met, we were in our 30s and she was a lawyer on her way to being partner, in the most prominent firm in KC. She had already won a couple of awards. We met and married within eight months and within two years had two children. She said to me, “Anybody can generate billable hours, but nobody can mother these children like I can. Would you mind if I left the firm to be a full-time mother?” She has been a fulltime mother for 30 years. She has five times the earning capacity I have. My wife was not offended. It was a true statement for many women who have a career. But she felt like the most important thing she could do was be a mother to those three daughters. That is the testimony of a lot of women, not just Butker.
DM: It is my wife’s testimony, as well.
TB: So why are we even having this conversation, Dwight?
DM: Because Harrison put it out there in public realm and …
TB: I don’t agree with that either. This was like a church service. We allowed the media in. It got circulated. But nobody at Benedictine College asked for it to be circulated. Let’s be honest: part of it was because it was the Kansas City Chiefs who have won three of the last five Super Bowls. He is the kicker that has put them into the victory circle in each of those Super Bowls. If this had been the Dallas Cowboys or some team that was horrible, we probably would not have it commented on. But he is a very famous athlete from what Bob Costas calls “America’s team now.” So that is what was newsworthy. All of us here were shocked that people cared what a bunch of Catholics in Atchison, Kansas, are saying. I don’t think he saw that as a platform for speaking to America.
DM: That is a very good perspective. You are aware, of course, America’s real team is the Pittsburgh Steelers, and I happen to have contact with some of those guys. But professional athletes are famous people and have a platform, and they can say something, even off the cuff, and it can become a word of influence and impact. A person like Harrison is old enough to realize that when you take a stage like this in this kind of media age where everything is recorded and much of it is distributed, you are speaking to a much broader audience. Even in my little church where I will have 30 people in the sanctuary there will be others in 6-8 states watching or listening. Maybe it was a learning experience for him that when you take a public stage and a microphone you can have a reach you never dreamed of. I wonder whether this has been a good thing for the college. He seems to have articulated much of what the college teaches, whether it has caught the attention of students, of donors, of bishops around the country. Do you think that is a fair analysis?
TB: Benedictine College has monks and sisters. This community started before the civil war. We had a children’s home for those who lost their parents in the Civil War. It is deeply intertwined with the history of this wonderful town. It is predominately Protestant, and we have always had a sense of being the minority. When you are in the minority, you don’t have a swagger about you. There is no swagger here. This is the most humble group of people I have ever been around. And they serve the community and have served it quietly for a long time. Our students give out about 2,000 sandwiches a year. We work in the public schools mostly with at risk children. That is something media should have focused on because that is also part of Catholic social teaching, that we take seriously here. That is why they recruited me to come here. I can not say what impact it is going to have on the college. When something like this happens, you do want to pay attention and discern what was our role, but I am not in those conversations. I trust the leadership. We have a remarkable president. I am in a lot of places, but this is the finest college president I have ever met. He is phenomenal. I have never met a president that is so involved in the life of the students. The college is booming. Is he going to look at this and try to understand it? Yes! Are we going to change our teaching. No, because it is the teaching of the Church. The Benedictine is the order that existed before the Church split east and west, let alone before the Reformation. It has a deep, deep patrimony of peacemaking. That is part of what motivated the Nuns letter. It is in the DNA here. We will have other people speaking who will have a different tone, the same message, but a different tone.
DM: The most troubling part of the speech (and I think there were several things) was the patriarchy that ran through the speech. Not only did he extol women to go home and have babies, he called by name many men, but when he quoted a woman he refused to call her name—Taylor Swift. She represents everything on the other side of every fence. Then he got into this thing about men, how men need to be in charge, when men are not in charge, bad things happen. Where is this coming from and what does it mean? He called for men to be men. He said men have been fed this lie that we are not needed in the home or in the culture; that is something I have never heard anywhere by anybody. Where is this strong macho patriarchy coming from and what does this mean?
TB: Let me walk you off the ledge. We work with poor marginal families here and most of them do not have a father in the home. I think there is a strong link between juvenal delinquency and the lack of a father. I heard it through that set of lenses, because it is true. I don’t know the guy. His mom is a physicist. He is not telling women to get back in the kitchen. I don’t think he believes that. When I hear something controversial, I expect a hermeneutic of charity. I hope when I speak, somebody will say, “Who is Tory, and what does he do, and let’s try to understand it in that context.” That is what I do with him and with you. That is what his coach does with him and with everybody else. I don’t think it is patriarchal in the sense that you describe. What I am doing is trying to understand him in that context. With broken families, often the father is not present, and if he is present, it is not a good presence. That is not a conservative or liberal issue. Our society is in trouble. Like what Jason Kelce said, “If you are failing as a parent, you are failing.” I think that is what Butker is saying.
DM: You are giving a very charitable spin on this speech. There is a subculture in the United States that is very religious: not just Catholic, but Protestant, and Morman, and Jewish. All these religions have a subcultural that is very patriarchal, that is very female submissive. I don’t think it is strange for people to wonder if this is the subculture out of which he is speaking. He certainly used a lot of phrases consistent with that kind of perspective on social life on the United States. Then he went back to the Latin Mass. Is he really enamored with the Latin language, or is this a cypher for something bigger? He is very active in the pre-Vatican II movement.
TB: Like you, I am a refugee from Baptist fundamentalism. I know that mindset. It is not a point on the theological spectrum; it is a mindset. You can have fundamentalism on the Right, you can have fundamentalism on the Left. One of the signs of a Fundamentalist is you are epistemologically insecure. You are not able or willing to enter into another person’s point of view and seek to understand them from their point of view: what forms them or shapes them. That is what I am trying to advocate. I don’t think he is a Catholic version of the Fundamentalist that you and I both are concerned about. He was a chemical engineer from Georgia Tech. He is very methodical. He is regimented. He is disciplined. I am not surprised that he is drawn to something like the Catholic mass. It has this same kind of order and predictably, which also becomes an opportunity for transcendence when you submit yourself to it. I see his parents having background in science at Emory, he studied engineering, he is a kicker; he is very methodical, and he wants his religion to be like that. I am none of those things. It is a world I have to work to get into and understand. Most of the people who have criticized his speech have not worked to get into that world to understand what he is saying. If the demographers are correct and we have a huge influx of Muslims into this country over the next 20 or 30 years, we are going to learn, how to enter into that world—of discipline and structure—and how that leads to transcendence. I think this is an opportunity for American to learn how to enter into other people’s worlds. It is not just the conservatives that “other” people; liberals do it also. What happened is, he poked the bear, he woke the bear, and now he is bearing the woke. … I loved the Taylor Swift reference. She probably would not agree with him. He was in good company on that one.
DM: It is probably a good thing he did not call her out by name because she would have written a song about him and recorded it.
TB: She still may!
DM: Thank you for this conversation. It has been interesting, and you are very articulate. Thank you for being available to me and my readers. I have been writing for a long time, and I know what pushback is. God bless you in your work in Atchison, Kansas! I am sure Andy Reid, and Harrison Butker, and all the folks out there are hoping that someday the Kansas City Chiefs have as many Super Bowl rings as the Pittsburgh Steelers!
Link to Transcript: https://themeetinghouse.net/tory-baucum/