Originally published at The Catholic Thing
It was one year in a single day. On 11th May, the year 2024 unfolded for American Catholics. In the space of a few hours, two commencement addresses were delivered: Jonathan Roumie at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and Harrison Butker at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
Much of what marked Catholic life in America – ecclesially, culturally, politically – in 2024 can be heard in the different approaches offered by the two speakers on that day.
If there had been a Time magazine Catholic of the Year for being newsworthy, it might well have been Butker, who is adjacent to the celebrity world of Taylor Swift (who actually was Time’s Person of the Year 2023, her second time, though in 2017 she was part of a group).
The Butker speech got more attention than Roumie’s by several orders of magnitude. That itself was a telling sign of who shaped the national conversation in 2024.
Butker began by castigating “bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane,” and presenting himself as one who “preach[es] more hard truths about accepting your lane and staying in it.”
But who is in which lane when dispensing Catholic advice: Roumie, a
