“Episcopal bishop who urged Trump to ‘have mercy’ to resign post in Washington DC”, 3 October 2026 (Photo via The Guardian — the original report)
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: THE HAVE-MERCY PULPIT
Born in the days after the second inaugural, 2025, when the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, used a sermon at the National Cathedral to ask the newly sworn president to have mercy on immigrants and on LGBTQ+ people.…
…(cont) In September, the president shared photographs of gold-plated statues, mended fountains, and an arch rising in his own honor, all of it work he credited to National Park Service crews updating the capital under his beautification label. Days later he urged the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to take down the abstract steel sculpture at its entrance, called Infinity, and put up in its place a thirty-foot Washington Colossus.
This week, a different kind of notice arrived. Budde told her diocese she is leaving the post on June 3, 2028, once her successor is consecrated and ordained — more than three years after the sermon, timed so the seat is never without a bishop, only ever, eventually, without her.
Born: a sentence, January 2025. Died: by her own letter, June 3, 2028. Survived by: the pulpit itself, which does not resign; whoever is consecrated into it next; a diocese that watched its one quoted request for mercy outlast the news cycle that made it famous. Preceded, in its way, by the abstract sculpture at the museum door, which the president asked to be replaced with a man thirty feet tall.
Washington keeps adding statues. It is getting a new one, Colossus-sized, where an abstract shape used to turn in the wind. The ask for mercy gets a succession plan instead — a hogwash arrangement by which the pulpit stays filled on schedule and the man who was asked keeps deciding what gets built around it.
In lieu of flowers, read the letter in full before the new bishop is seated.
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“She asks the president to have mercy, and a season later the capital's getting gold-plated statues and a thirty-foot George Washington instead of an answer. That's not beautification, that's a receipt: money for the monument, silence for the ask. Watch what gets funded while the one person who said the quiet part out loud packs up her office.”
“Beautifying the capital and one bishop's retirement calendar are two completely unrelated items; I don't know why people keep stapling them together. The president is simply restoring dignity to the monuments — a thirty-foot Colossus is just scale, not a statement, scale is not a statement. Did I just say a thirty-foot statue isn't a statement? That doesn't sound like me.”
Mariann Budde gained national attention for calling on US president to consider immigrants and LGBTQ+ people Rev Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington DC who gained national attention when she called on Donald Trump to “ have mercy ” on the country’s immigrants and LGBTQ+ community after his second inauguration, is…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
