Pro-Life Chiefs' Kicker Harrison Butker Signs Record Contract

| 08/6/2024

By: Steven Schwankert

The Super Bowl champion NFL player caused controversy in May with comments at a commencement

Kansas City Chiefs' Harrison Butker celebrates winning Super Bowl LVII with his children in Glendale, Ariz., February 12, 2023.
Kansas City Chiefs' Harrison Butker celebrates winning Super Bowl LVII with his children in Glendale, Ariz., February 12, 2023. In a May 11 commencement address at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, Butker told graduates, "There is nothing good about playing God with having children -- whether that be your ideal number or the perfect time to conceive. No matter how you spin it, there is nothing natural about Catholic birth control." (OSV News photo/Caitlin O'Hara, Reuters)

Pro-life advocate and NFL player Harrison Butker has signed a record deal with the Kansas City Chiefs, making him the highest-paid kicker in the league.

Butker, who has helped the Chiefs win three Super Bowls in the last four years, represented himself in negotiating the reported $26 million contract, with $17.75 million guaranteed, according to ESPN.

Butker frequently shares and posts about his love for the Catholic faith. In 2023, a photo of Butker wearing a brown scapular while kicking the game-winning field goal in the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory over the Eagles went viral in Catholic circles. 

In May, he gave a graduation address at Benedictine College in Kansas that sparked both backlash and backslapping among audience members and throughout the nation. Butker railed against “the pervasiveness of disorder” underlying American culture and even sectors of the Catholic Church itself, urging his audience to reject the “church of nice” by being “authentically and unapologetically Catholic,” especially where doing so countered “the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Earlier this year the kicker showed up to the Super Bowl parade with ashes on his forehead since the parade was on Ash Wednesday. Butker donated a jersey and sent a touching message to the family of Lisa Lopez-Galvan, the Catholic mother killed during a mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade.

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OSV News contributed to this report.

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