A Bishop Asked For Mercy. The President Called It Nasty.

Donald Trump demanded that a bishop apologize for pleading mercy for frightened children. Mariann Budde, 66, the first woman to serve as bishop of Washington, announced that she will leave the Diocese of Washington on June 3, 2028, after her successor is consecrated. On January 21, 2025, at the National Day of Prayer service in Washington National Cathedral, with the new president sitting in the pew as a guest, she asked him — in his presence, on camera — to show mercy to immigrant families and to gay, lesbian, and transgender children who, she said, feared for their lives. He answered the same day in a social-media post: the sermon was nasty in tone, not compelling or smart, and the bishop and her church owed him a public apology. She did not apologize.

That answer is worth looking at plainly, because it is not a quarrel between a politician and a preacher. When federal officers cleared Lafayette Square in 2020 and the president walked across the cleared ground holding a Bible he did not open, this same bishop wrote that he had “used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands.” Four years later she stood in his cathedral and asked him to have mercy. He answered that the request itself was an offense against him. This is the inversion the prophets of Israel were sent to name — not the neglect of religion but its use. “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Jeremiah named the leaders who soothe and lie. What we have is worse than soothing. We have a demand that the soothing be withdrawn, that the church apologize for saying the one word the church exists to say.

I do not say that from the outside. I stand inside a tradition that has blessed every convenient flag it was offered. My church held slaves. My church sheltered abusers and moved them between parishes while the families were told to pray. My church has, in my own lifetime, stayed quiet while the people sitting in the pews next to mine were taken out of their homes, and has spoken loudly when speaking was safe. Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching beside King at Selma, wrote that in a free society some are guilty, but all are responsible. That “all” includes me, and it includes the bishop, and it includes the congregation that applauds a politician for quoting the Beatitudes at a rally and then goes home and locks the door on the neighbor who mows the lawn.

The bodies in this are not abstractions and they are not illustrations. They are children who hear the president of the United States treat their existence as a political problem and then lie awake wondering whether the adults in the room will do anything about it. They are the U.S.-citizen children of parents taken at an apartment door or a workplace parking lot, who now know exactly what the country thinks of their mother. They are the trans teenager told by adults with microphones that he is a threat to something, and who believes them, because he is sixteen and has no reason not to. And they are the protesters in Lafayette Square in 2020, driven back with force so that a man with a Bible could have his photograph taken. A religion that has any left in it knows what to do with bodies like these. It puts itself between them and the power that is preparing to spend them.

Here I will not pretend the ground is level, because it is not. There is a categorical difference between a bishop asking a president to have mercy and a vice president telling a Christian audience that the antichrist may be walking among the political opposition, and being received in the same season as a man of faith. One of those is prophecy: the tradition doing what it was built to do, standing in the house of power and saying what the power does not want said. The other is the oldest trick our inheritance knows — taking the God who said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” and putting him to work for a faction, turning the terror of judgment, the sheep and the goats, the last made first, into a campaign-season threat against the neighbors. Do not call them equivalent. A call for mercy and a call to hunt are not the same thing wearing different clothes. The second empties the first, and it has been doing so in this country, in broad daylight, with the vocabulary of the very faith it is hollowing out.

And it is not only a Christian question. The Torah commands the love of the stranger more often than almost any other commandment — thirty times, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” a memory meant to be the precondition of every kindness that follows. The Qur’an makes care for the orphan, the widow, and the traveler the measure of whether a society has religion at all. The rabbi told the story of a Samaritan — a foreigner, a despised outsider, the last person his hearers would have expected — and ended it with “go and do likewise.” Every contemplative tradition I can reach recognizes the same thing: mercy toward the powerless is not a political preference. It is the test.

So what is a faithful church to do? Not what it did in 2020, and not what it is doing now. The Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico wrote it down plainly in 2003, in Strangers No Longer: every person has the right to seek a livelihood in his own land, and when that fails, to migrate; sovereign nations may control their borders; and the undocumented person has the same dignity as anyone else. No one gets to pretend — in either direction — that the migrant, the child, or the queer kid is the price of a political arrangement. A church that means any of this puts itself between the state and the person the state has decided is expendable: a lawyer at the hearing, a bed for the night, a name on a list when a list is all that is left, an adult who does not flinch when the child asks whether she will be taken too. That is not politics. That is what the word was always for.

To the president: you were offered mercy, in your own cathedral, by a woman doing her job. You answered with a demand for an apology. I say this not to win an argument but because the offer is still open, and the tradition you invoke does not close its doors on you first. And to the clergy who bless the raid, to the officials who sign the order, to the parishioner who prays for the government on Sunday and fears the neighbor on Monday: you are a person, and the God you claim knows you better than the position you are defending. You can still be someone who stops.

Óscar Romero said it into a microphone, in a cathedral, to a government that had already killed his friend and would kill him the next day: in the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you — stop the repression. He was not negotiating. He was not managing an audience. He did not survive it. That is what the word looks like when it is not for sale. A bishop who stands up in January, asks a president to have mercy on children, refuses to apologize, and then announces that she will hand her diocese to a successor in 2028 is not being silenced. The word is not withdrawn when the office ends. Tonight some child will not sleep because of what powerful adults have said about her, and somewhere a door will be left open anyway — because that is the only thing this tradition has ever been able to offer, and it is enough.