It's funny, how the Gospels talk continually of mercy, and the men and women that Christianity has honored over the years do likewise. Yet so many who hear the words on Sunday refuse to apply it in any way in their lives the rest of the week.
Case in point: The leader whom The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde urged, in the Washington Prayer Service at the inaugural events, to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ showed not mercy but his own thin skin. It was a ghastly sight.
Look at this YouTube clip of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC last week. Does her dulcet, pleading tone seem remotely “nasty”?
Does she strike you as “not compelling or smart” (unlike, presumably, her annoyed listener, who once bragged about being “a very stable genius”)? Me neither.
It is rich, this demand that she apologize coming from Donald Trump—who, in his 50 years in the spotlight, has been known to say he was sorry only once, and that when he was in danger of losing the 2016 election following his gleeful comments about groping women on the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape.
Contrast Trump with Mike Pence when a cast member of the Broadway musical Hamilton read a statement saying "We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us."
What, you don’t remember what Pence said? Neither did I, so I had to look it up. The then-Veep said he wasn’t offended by the message and that even the boos he endured from audience members didn’t bother him, because they were “what freedom sounds like.”
On the other hand, Trump’s digital thermonuclear thunderclap has set off predictable responses from his followers.
Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia has even tweeted that Bishop Budde “should be added to the deportation list.”
On Facebook, an “I’m with her” meme got people I’ve known for years acting most unsocially with each other on the social media platform.
And Budde has been bombarded with death wishes from people who call themselves Christians.
Judging from the President’s response after he withdrew a security detail from Dr. Anthony Fauci (“Certainly I would not take responsibility”), I don’t anticipate pangs of remorse to fill Trump’s heart about the bishop’s well-being.
I also didn’t presume Trump would act like anything but a kindergarten crybaby when Budde implored him to treat with mercy America’s new marginalized. But I expected more from the nation’s other religious leaders, including, I’m sorry to say, so many in my own Roman Catholic Church.
I’m looking at you, Timothy Cardinal Dolan. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by your lack of moral backbone.
At the inauguration, the head of New York’s archdiocese asked God to “give our leader wisdom, for he is your servant aware of his own weakness and brevity of life.”
Sorry, but there has been nothing in “our leader,” before his inauguration or in the week and a half since, that remotely suggests he’s “aware of his own weakness.” In fact, one of his favorite putdowns of opponents is that they’re “weak.”
More comically, Cardinal Dolan told Maria Bartiromo before the inauguration that he had talks with Trump “in the past where he’s pretty blunt about, you know, he can’t say that he was raised as a, as a very zealous Christian, but he takes his Christian faith seriously.”
This mealy-mouthed, selective see-no-evil act reached its nadir twice since 2016, involving the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown Manhattan, a charity event once notable for Presidential candidates in both parties taking a break from political warfare to make comically self-deprecating remarks.
Until Trump, as he so often does, made a shambles of the dinner in his first election bid with a cascade of insults that provoked boos from many in the audience, then delivered another disgraceful performance last autumn.
Nobody could have blamed Cardinal Dolan if he had pulled the tablecloth out from under Trump either time. Instead, he uttered not the slightest word of disapproval, not even an earnest request to leave any spiteful remarks at the door.
The fallout was bad enough to make you wonder if the Smith Dinner had outlived its purpose by devolving into an irredeemable fat-cat forum.
Cardinal Dolan was never shy about criticizing Joe Biden about abortion or the influx of migrants, to name a few issues. But when has he disagreed with Trump about anything?
What is the Cardinal afraid of? The fury of Trump, or the cooled ardor of well-heeled conservative Catholics in the archdiocese?
Silence about Trump’s bullying, of both Budde and those she championed, is by no means universal in the Catholic Church. In fact, a local parish priest, in a sermon I heard earlier this week, indicated, correctly, that there was nothing contrary to Catholic teaching in what she said.
But it matters enormously when the leading Catholic cleric in the world’s media capital fails to defend a fellow person of the cloth who is guilty of nothing but reminding the new President and his followers of the biblical admonition, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)
Leave aside (though you shouldn’t) the verse noting that “as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)
By resorting to another one of his social media tantrums, against a cleric that the mass of Americans hadn’t even heard of before this, Trump was engaging in the same sort of dangerous petulance shown when King Henry II of England screamed, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!” (Or, as shortened by posterity: “Will someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?”)
That didn’t end well in Canterbury Cathedral for St. Thomas Becket.
What President before Trump has ever demanded an apology from a religious leader? What President before him has ever misbehaved in the way that led biblical prophets like Daniel, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to risk the wrath of their rulers by calling them to account?
Bishop Budde would have been well within her rights to quote Nathan’s denunciation of King David to Trump: “Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?” (2 Samuel 12: 9)
Yet she never said a word about how he has broken his marriage vows multiple times, stiffed his company’s creditors, ruined investors, steered government meetings and business to his own properties, ridiculed a reporter with disabilities, mocked the looks of an opposing candidate’s wife, used sensitive information for blackmail and for charitable donations for his own purposes, excused dictators responsible for the deaths of thousands, and promised retribution (now in progress) for anyone who opposed him.
She only asked him to use what he saw as God’s providential rescue of his life after last year’s assassination attempt on behalf of the people who need mercy the most.
Contrary to the charge in his post-sermon tweet that she had “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way," it was he who meanly dragged the “world of politics” into the church with the opportunistic adoption of right-to-life beliefs he had never held before entering the GOP primaries nine years ago, and by entangling so many in the Christian Nationalism movement in his January 6 plotting.
And it was not Budde who promoted division in a nation that one of Trump’s GOP predecessors, Ronald Reagan, likened to the biblical “city on a hill.
Look, I get that people, whatever their leanings, don’t want to hear continually about politics from the pulpit. Neither do I, if for no other reason than that there’s no spiritual component to ensuring basic government functions like picking up garbage and delivering the mail.
But this week’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz reminds us that some political issues are inherently moral; that lasting dishonor accrues to any nation that stigmatizes outsiders; and that the road to the death camps began with seeing others as less than human before proceeding to seizing them in their homes.
I fear that, by not protesting the President’s attempt at winning through intimidation against another spiritual leader, Cardinal Dolan is doing more than simply encouraging an already rampant cynicism among the young about organized religion that, as New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose recently noted, is “contributing to a more disconnected, careless and cruel society.”
I worry that the
Cardinal is silently consenting to outright religious intolerance spurred on by
a capricious, vindictive leader who recognizes no limits on his impulses or
appetites.
The smear—surely cleared in advance with Trump—was so weaselly and egregious that it couldn’t by shrugged off by Dolan, who rightly called the remarks “nasty” and “scurrilous.” (Even in this instance, the Cardinal couldn’t bring himself to blame the truculent corner man who directed the hit below the belt.)
The prelate could have justifiably applied the same adjectives to Trump’s diatribe against Budde.
History will relegate him to the shadows reserved for the timid and temporizing, while it will hail Bishop Budde as following the example of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons:
“If we lived in a state
where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we
see that avarice, anger, pride, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond
charity, modesty, justice, and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little—even
at the risk of being heroes.”
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