When Bishop Mariann Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington took to the pulpit of the National Cathedral during a national prayer service on Tuesday, the day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, and spoke up on behalf of some of the most vulnerable people in the United States, she was performing one of the most essential tasks of Christian ministry.
Bishop Budde urged Mr. Trump, who was present at the service, to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” particularly L.G.B.T. people and immigrants. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here,” she said. “May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people, the good of all people in this nation and the world.”
Mr. Trump has yet to show any sign of heeding Bishop Budde’s call, opting instead to demean and denigrate her. “The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform early Wednesday morning. “She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!” Supporters of Mr. Trump piled on, contending that Bishop Budde’s remarks were inappropriately adversarial for a prayer service with the president. (One Republican congressman, Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, bizarrely suggested that Bishop Budde be “added to the deportation list.” She is an American citizen, born in New Jersey.)
While it may not be common for a member of the American clergy to directly confront an American president over his policy and rhetoric, the tradition of religious leaders confronting political figures about their affronts to human dignity—often in a liturgical context, and at times to their faces—is hardly new. The Catholic Church has its own history of prophetic voices using the moral authority of the priesthood to remind political leaders of the Christian precept of human dignity.
Hearing these objections, it is difficult not to recall the response of Daniel Berrigan, S.J., to criticism of his direct action against draft offices during the Vietnam War: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlour of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”
Father Berrigan’s apologia is of a piece with many other examples of Christian clergy speaking truth to power. The diplomatic protection afforded by the papal office has granted popes, for example, considerable latitude to directly confront tyrannical heads of state. In 1998, Pope St. John Paul II criticized the Cuban government’s human rights abuses during a Mass in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, the site of thousands of triumphal rallies by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In front of Castro himself, the pope excoriated Cuba’s militant state atheism: “The ideological and economic systems succeeding one another in the last two centuries…presumed to relegate religion to the merely private sphere, stripping it of any social influence or importance. In this regard, it is helpful to recall that a modern state cannot make atheism or religion one of its political ordinances.”
John Paul II’s words in Cuba are particularly noteworthy because, like Bishop Budde, he not only called a political leader to account to his face but did so in the context of a liturgy. But this is far from the only time a pontiff has directly challenged a repressive regime. More recently, in 2017, Pope Francis met with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, driven from their homes in Myanmar by the military regime’s genocidal campaign against them. Speaking in Dhaka, he proclaimed that “the presence of God today is also called Rohingya,” sending an unmistakable message of papal disapproval to the military junta just across the Bangladesh border with Myanmar.
One of the most inspiring acts of Catholic defiance to an authoritarian regime remains the German church’s dissemination of Pope Pius XI’s March 1937 encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With deep anxiety”). Appalled by the Third Reich’s racialist ideology and fearful of its encroachment upon Catholics’ religious liberty, Pius wrote the encyclical in German and ordered it to be read from the pulpit of every church in Germany.
Pope Pius wrote:
Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds….
None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are “as a drop of a bucket.”
In accordance with the pope’s instructions, German clergy read the encyclical at churches across Germany on Palm Sunday. At this point, the church was one of the last major institutions in Germany not completely under Adolf Hitler’s thumb, and Sunday Mass was arguably the only place where a sizable share of the German people could hear an official, institutional denunciation of the dictator’s ideology. Enraged, Hitler ordered the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Catholic clergy and sent many to concentration camps.
On the other side of the Atlantic, and several decades later, St. Óscar Romero paid the ultimate price for his prophetic witness against the Salvadoran government’s violations of human rights. Archbishop Romero regularly critiqued the grotesque inequality between El Salvador’s elite and its poor and identified the Salvadoran military from the pulpit for its brutal repression of the people’s quest for social justice. Moments before his assassination during Mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador, Archbishop Romero said in his homily:
You have just heard in Christ’s Gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us and that those who try to fend off the danger will lose their lives, while those who out of love for Christ give themselves to the service of others will live, live like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone.
In 1978, Archbishop Romero had asked, as if anticipating Bishop Budde’s detractors: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin…what gospel is that?” That same year, accepting an honorary degree at the University of Louvain in Belgium, he had warned the church against “that false universalization which always ends up in connivance with the powerful.” For Archbishop Romero, denouncing the abuse of power was an essential part of the church’s mission, and to remain silent about injustice for the sake of propriety would have been an unconscionable betrayal of the Gospel.
Not every religious leader who speaks out against politicians’ affronts to human dignity faces the same repercussions to life and liberty that Archbishop Romero suffered, or that the Catholic clergy of Germany faced when circulating “Mit Brennender Sorge.” Yet all of them are living out the vocation to which Archbishop Romero called Christians in this final homily: They give themselves to the service of others, using their positions of authority to speak up on behalf of the persecuted, the vulnerable and the marginalized. The vocation of Christian leaders is not to flatter those who abuse their power and visit suffering upon the vulnerable; it is to call them to account, however uncomfortable the reckoning might be.
Bishop Budde’s empathy for the persecuted may have annoyed or discomfited powerful politicians on Tuesday; this is a sign that she is doing her job. Her sermon is but the most recent in a long history of Christian exhortations to the powerful to abide by the values of the Gospel:
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me…‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’
