Butker’s subtle anti-Semitism

Traditionalist Catholics sully themselves with anti-Jewish trope

Recently, Harrison Butker, the placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, gave the commencement address at Benedictine College, a small Catholic college in Kansas. In his address, Mr. Butker spoke eloquently of the impact of the Catholic faith on his life while calling for the new graduates to “lean into their faith” as he has.  By lean into the faith, Butker means that Catholics, laypersons and clergy alike, must live out the Catholic faith, that half-measures are not enough.  He also took to task the Catholic shepherds, priests and more senior clergy, for failing to provide clear guidance to the laity about the teachings of the Church, in particular by the ambiguous statements on moral issues they make.

Much of the secular media has reacted with inchoate rage that a devout, traditionalist Catholic gave a commencement address to graduates of a deeply conservative Catholic college in which he emphasized the need to adhere to the Church’s moral teachings on extra-marital sexual relations, artificial contraception, abortion, surrogacy, etc. But the utter silliness and egregious stupidity of such rage is not the focus of this essay, but rather Butker’s allusion to a view of Jews held by far too many Traditionalist Catholics - Jesus Christ was killed by “the Jews”.

In his address, Butker alluded to this opinion when he said “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”

The reference to Congress regards legislation that would classify the expression of certain opinions regarding Jews, Israelis, and the State of Israeli as criminal acts of anti-Semitism. In expressing disagreement with such legislation, Butker is in good company with most civil libertarians, Constitutional scholars, and this writer.  In a recent Potomac Watch podcast, Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel excoriated those in Congress who are making expression of hateful opinions a crime.  She rightly noted that the laws on the book against incitement to violence are sufficient, if enforced fairly and in a non-partisan manner, to combat anti-semitism. Similarly, many opinion writers and legal experts have expressed their concern that Congress is attempting to criminalize speech and opinion, a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.  The right way to confront hateful opinions is to shine the light of truth on them.

Which brings us to the reference to “biblical teaching” made by Mr. Butker.  Among baptized Christians, opinion is divided on how to understand the four Gospel accounts of the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth, specifically on the amount of culpability for that unjust execution shared by the leadership of the Jewish community of the day with the Roman Procurator who had the sentence carried out.  However, the official teaching of the Catholic Church, to which Mr. Butler must give intellectual assent as a faithful Catholic, is “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

Thus, while non-Catholic may or may not be in accord with their particular Christian denomination when they assert that the Bible teaches that “Jesus was killed by the Jews”, and everyone is free under the Constitutional protections of free speech to say so, Mr. Butker is bound by the teachings of the Catholic Church that repudiates that opinion.

The greater problem is that Mr. Butker is not alone. There seem to be a not insignificant number of conservative Catholics who do not realize that to blame “the Jews” for the unjust killing of Jesus is contrary to the official teaching of the Church as determined by an Ecumenical Council of the Church and solemnly declared by the Pope.  Prominent in numbers among those Catholics who think that Jesus was killed by “the Jews” are those Catholics that prefer to attend Mass celebrated according to the Extraordinary Form in Latin rather than the Ordinary Form, the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) and Novus Ordo (NO) respectively.

Mr. Butker made it clear in his commencement address that he is a TLM Catholic, even going so far to counsel the school’s graduates “to pick a place to move where it is readily available.”  All of that is well and good, for the Church writ large and the Catholic Church in particular has benefitted greatly from a diversity of Liturgical practices throughout its two millennia history with no harm to its doctrinal unity. What is not well and good is the notion among at least some TLM Catholics that the teachings formulated at Vatican Council II do not enjoy the same status as the teachings of previous Ecumenical Councils and therefore can be ignored or even rejected.  The definitive teachings on relations with non-Christians, specifically with the Jewish people collectively, found in Nostra Aetate are reportedly rejected by a not insignificant number of TLM Catholics.

I feel quite sure that Mr. Butker is not an anti-semite.  I suspect he would be quite surprised to learn that his adherence to an opinion that Jesus was killed by “the Jews” harks back to a trope that formed the foundation for Christians of various denominations to participate or acquiesce in the many anti-Jewish pogroms over the last 1500 years that culminated in the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered for simply being Jews.  But words reflect ideas and they matter; he needs to be told that his words reveal a form of subtle anti-semitism that for too long permeated the Church with disastrous effect for our Jewish brothers and sisters.

Even more to the point for Mr. Butker as a devout Catholic, I suspect that he is unaware that by adhering to a particular interpretation summarized in his words “… the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus…” he is attaching himself, and by extension all TLM Catholics, to a teaching which the Catholic Church has repudiated and condemned. He spoke eloquently of his faith and how the TLM enriches his life.  By adopting a position that an Ecumenical Council of the Church has condemned, he puts himself at odds with the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.  TLM Catholics are rightly praised for their reverent worship, devout liturgical practices, and adherence to the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church - the rejection of Nostra Aetate implied by the claim that Jesus was killed by “the Jews” only sullies their good reputation; and they need to be told.