Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The National Catholic Register
September 22, 2025
Charlie Kirk was a controversial figure, as anyone with strong political opinions in our polarized culture today necessarily becomes.
While all Catholics should appreciate his cogent and persuasive public defense and praise of the gift of every human life, marriage, family and the goodness of creation male and female, they can certainly disagree with him about the political candidates he’s supported as well as his approach to immigration policy, gun control, the death penalty, climate change, IVF, the effects of the Civil Rights Act, the size and purpose of government, the role of women, the moral qualification of IVF, the approach to Islam, and various other positions he’s advocated in public disputations over the last 13 years.
Since his Sept. 10 assassination on the campus of Utah Valley University, those who did not know him well or at all have become acquainted with him through the attention his murder has justly garnered on television, radio, social media, podcasts. Everyone has been able to watch the videos of his campus colloquies, listen to his podcast conversations, and observe the way that he interacted with those were among his many friends and those who considered themselves his many foes. His five-hour memorial service on Sept. 21 was unlike anything in recent American history, attended by crowds bigger than any U.S. funeral in decades and rivaling the in person and online numbers of the recent funeral of Pope Francis in Rome.
What is obvious to anyone who looks with eyes unjaundiced by ideology is that Charlie Kirk was a good and virtuous man who in 31 years had an enormous impact on the lives of others, and not just on political elections. His assassination has not just given added emphasis to his words but also to the inspirational quality of his life for people young and old. Whether one generally agreed or disagreed with his political opinions or the candidates and causes he supported, there really should be no disagreement about his obvious virtues and how our society needs far more to strive to live by them.
First, he was a thoroughly sincere Christian. “The most important thing,” he said to an interviewer, “is my faith in my life.” His Christian discipleship was more important than his political ideas or support, even more important than his marriage and family.
Second, he lived and shared his faith publicly. He didn’t privatize it and wasn’t ashamed of it. Rather than hide the light of Christ under a bed or basket, he cheerfully wanted it to radiate and illumine others. As a modern apostle going to the areopagi of his day, he gave witness to the way Christ positively impacted his life each day.
Third, he was an excellent friend. Despite his travel schedule, daily podcast, duties in the home as well as at the helm of national organizations, he always made time for his friends, sent scores of them daily Bible verses, called, texted and emailed them, congratulating them on successes or asking how he could help in their sufferings. His amiability likewise extended to those with whom he disagreed. Like President Abraham Lincoln, he knew that the best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.
Fourth, he was a loving husband and father, and an apostle of marriage and family. He regularly urged the young people on campus to prioritize getting married young and raising a good family. Against the extended adolescence and irresponsibility that have reigned since the sexual revolution, he pointed to marriage as a school of love and responsibility and therefore as a path to happiness. His wife Erika’s testimony of some of his habits as a husband and dad are real models for husbands everywhere, like the notes he would write to her describing the happiest moments of his week and asking how he could better serve her.
Fifth, he was courageous. In the midst of a cancel culture that has intimidated so many to nervous submission and full-time reticence, he routinely went into the lions’ den of college campuses to debate in a courteous, cordial, civil way those who disagreed with him. Many are terrified to have one conflictual conversation in private; he was willing to have dozens of them sequentially in public on the widest possible array of topics. He kept going even after the death threats started arriving. Courage, we know, does not mean the total absence of fear, but doing what we believe God is asking of us despite our fears. Charlie once said, “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.” He will be. It was his faith in Christ, crucified and risen, that made him so courageous.
Sixth, he was a truth seeker and speaker. When his interlocuters made a good point, he was quick to agree. It was less about winning particular arguments than seeking the truth in conversation. He had a great confidence in what he knew and believed, and that was his starting point, but he was constantly trying to learn and to share with others what he learned. For that reason, he took arrays of online classes, was always reading and studying, and was incessantly asking questions, to see what he might learn from others.
Seventh, he was an excellent listener. Amid crowds that were sometimes moblike, he gave the microphone to others, patiently listened to their arguments, asked clarifications and then sought to respond. One of the reasons why so many felt heard by him was because he was genuinely attentive to them in an age in which many only fake listening while they formulate their rejoinder. This listening doubtless flowed not just from good habit in campus conversation, but from the way he sought to listen to the Word of God in prayer.
Eighth, he was patriotic. Patriotism is a Christian virtue. We should love our country, thank God for it, pray for it and unselfishly serve it. From the time he was 18, he committed himself to trying to make the country better. At a time when many Americans regularly speak about what they hate about their country, when only seven percent of families have a relative serving in the military, Charlie dedicated his professional life not just to doing what he thought would make the country stronger, but mobilizing others to join him. He was better and more virtuous than many of the political candidates he supported.
Ninth, he was a movement builder. He spoke plainly that Turning Point USA was not fundamentally about short-term electoral victories, but about forming a movement that could transform American life. He was concerned about what he considered a toxic culture on many college campuses and its impact not just on the lives of the young but also on the country. With long-term vision, he sought to bring Christian salt, light and leaven — and the political ideas that he thought flowed from faith — onto campus. He built not just two organizations but, as everyone has seen since his death, a huge movement. His death has not stopped that movement but already dramatically expanded it.
Tenth, he challenged young men in particular to grow up and take responsibility. After decades of masculine virtues’ being disparaged in popular culture and academia as a consequence of radical feminism’s push to smash the patriarchy and lionize effeminate and weak men, Charlie summoned — and modeled for — young men not to waste their lives on video games, drugs, porn and other enfeebling habits, but to dedicate themselves to virtue, hard work, honor, study, service, manly love, responsibility, marriage, family and even heroism. Millions of young men enlisted in his movement as a result. As Erika his widow powerfully said during his memorial service, Charlie gave his life to try to help people just like the lost Tyler Robinson who would assassinate him. That urgent and important work continues.
One of the reasons why some, especially self-labeled progressives, want to demonize him rather than recognize his virtues is because they have great difficulty distinguishing a person from his ideas. Part of this flows, philosophically, from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” and the conflation of thinking not just with being alive but with existence itself. It’s clearly been abetted by those in the LGBT movement believing they —their whole identity — are what they think about who they think they are. Hence once many progressives label someone opposed to their ideas, especially if they think those ideas are “hateful” or “violent,” they cannot fail to be opposed existentially to the “violent” “hater” himself. Just as they find it hard to distinguish Nazis from their anti-Semitism and Klansmen from their racism, so they believe Charlie’s opposition to some of their ideas is personal antipathy. Hence the need some, like Tyler Robinson, feel to respond to that “violence” by eliminating its source.
But ordinary people cannot fall into the same trap of conflating ideas and identity. We must recognize, as Charlie did, that people’s ideas can change, as his ideas developed over time, and as he saw various ideas change on campus. So Catholics don’t have to agree with all of Charlie Kirk’s political or even theological ideas to appreciate his obvious virtues, good moral habits that our society greatly and urgently needs.
Let’s pray that his death, and the lessons of his life, will help both those who agreed and disagreed with his political positions, to emulate those virtues.
