The Congressional attempt to censure Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde for her homily at the Washington National Cathedral appears to be going exactly nowhere.
Three months after the service tied to Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, the proposed resolution remains stuck in a committee in the House of Representatives. There has been no public action on what would be an extremely rare legislative censure of a preacher.
As BNG previously reported, the bill was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. James Comer, a conservative Republican and a Southern Baptist from Kentucky. There has been no recorded action on the bill since then.
House Resolution 59 is captioned: “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the sermon given by the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde at the National Prayer Service on January 21st, 2025, at the National Cathedral was a display of political activism and condemning its distorted message.”
Meanwhile, Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, recently gave an extended interview to Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels of Sojourners.
“We were struggling in 2017 with what President-elect Trump and his advisers would want.”
Budde explains why there was no homily at Trump’s first inaugural prayer service in 2017 — because the Trump team asked for no homily and the cathedral staff obliged.
Inaugural services for many years were planned by the cathedral staff, but at some point along the way presidential transition teams were given more say over what would happen in religious services at the cathedral, she explained.
“The preacher, the music, the speakers — while the cathedral was involved, the leadership really went to the inaugural committee,” Budde said. “We were struggling in 2017 with what President-elect Trump and his advisers would want. At some point, the request was made by the incoming Trump administration that there be no homily. That was a request from his side. The dean (Randy Marshall Hollerith), with my approval, said, ‘OK.’ That saved us from having to vet somebody that we may or may not have been enthusiastic about in the pulpit of the cathedral.”
All that changed in the summer of 2024, long before the November election was held, she continued. Leadership at the cathedral determined that going forward, “there would be a prayer service for the nation after the election. Its theme would be prayers of unity after the divisive nature of the electoral season, it would be an interfaith service, and the cathedral would be in charge of it from beginning to end, and the bishop of Washington would preach regardless of who won.”
Part of the concerns about the earlier evolution of the prayer service was that “regardless of who won, it would feel like a spiritual coronation of a civic outcome,” the bishop said. “We wanted to step away from that regardless of who won.”
“I am preaching a lot about mercy these days.”
For those who expressed concern about Budde directly addressing Trump in the sermon, she says that’s a common homiletic practice at special services.
“If you’re parents whose children are being baptized, if you are being ordained, if you are at a funeral, all of those things. The fact that people were — if you go back to any of the presidential homilies, you will see that, pretty commonly.”
Whether “mercy” was the right word for her sermon is “a really valid question,” she said. “It’s one that I struggled with. I was thinking about ‘empathy.’ I was thinking about ‘compassion.’”
Ironically, both those words have been all but banned by Trump’s allies, including evangelicals. Whole books have been written against the concept of empathy.
But mercy is a recurring theme in the Bible and in preaching, Bishop Budde said.
“I am preaching a lot about mercy these days. I’m preaching about our need for it. I’m preaching about how to stay in relationship with people who disagree with us. All of those things come up on a pretty regular basis, in part because it’s the conversation we’re having nationally.”
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Two versions of Christianity cross swords at the National Cathedral | Opinion by Alan Bean
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