Nationalized Cathedral
A Rebuke is in Order
Congress chartered the National Cathedral. After Bishop Marianne Budde’s blatant politicization of the National Day of Prayer on Tuesday, Congress should revoke that charter.
Bishop Budde used her congressionally chartered pulpit to bully the president on transgenderism and illegal immigration.
The bishop should know better.
The first perverts God’s law, and the second the law of nations.
But that would be asking too much.
The faith of generations of Americans has been gutted by preachers like Bishop Budde. Much of what our forefathers built has been captured by operatives like her, interlopers, and sheep-stealers, who ensure that the present generation is ignorant of and cut off from its patrimony.
President Trump understands that intuitively when it comes to the Panama Canal. A trust has been broken, and the spirit, if not the letter, of the treaty has been violated by our adversaries.
He is right to take it back.
Likewise, Bishop Budde broke the spirit of her cathedral’s charter.
The cathedral and its allied institutions, four schools, and extensive gardens, situated in Washington’s exclusive Mount Saint Alban’s neighborhood, is owned and operated by the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation.
Established by Congress and the President on January 6, 1893, the Foundation styles its cathedral as a “House of Prayer for All People.” 97 years later, construction was completed, and on September 29, 1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush helped consecrate the edifice as “a great church for national purposes.”[1. Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation – About Us, accessed January 22, 2025, https://pecf.org/aboutus.]
It has hosted funerals and memorials for prominent Americans since the 1960s, beginning with the funeral for Dwight D. Eisenhower. Most recently, before the National Day of Prayer debacle, the cathedral successfully hosted the funeral for Jimmy Carter. It was there that the nation witnessed on livestream the friendly rapport between then-President-elect Trump and former President Obama. Mr. Trump even graciously shook the hand of his former Vice President, Mike Pence.
The cathedral was doing its job, and then some. The nation’s house of prayer had become a site of national reconciliation.
But not for long.
Barely two weeks later, Bishop Budde overstepped and broke the spirit of her cathedral’s charter with her sectarian browbeating. In any other pulpit, this would be fine. But not in the nation’s semi-official pulpit and not as part of the inaugural festivities.
In fact, the so-called National Cathedral hasn’t been keeping faith with the American people for some time now.
Back in 2017, well before the BLM-inspired and antifa-induced riots engulfed the nation’s cities in 100 days of fire, the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation was stoking what would become another national conflagration.
Two cherished sets of stained-glass windows of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, given to the cathedral by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1953, were removed.[2. “The Now and Forever Windows,” Washington National Cathedral, accessed January 22, 2025, https://cathedral.org/college/windows/.] The Jackson window even depicted the Christian soldier reading his Bible.
The Foundation specifically cites the “impediment to prayer” caused by the Lee-Jackson windows because “public monuments reflect our public values.”
If that’s true, then the National Cathedral, the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, and her bishop ought to acknowledge what the public, in fact, values.[3. “The Now and Forever Windows,” Washington National Cathedral, accessed January 22, 2025, https://cathedral.org/college/windows/#faq.]
The public does not value the erasing of American history that we saw in 2020 or the divisive speech we heard from the cathedral’s pulpit Tuesday.
Americans want national reconciliation. They want to move forward into a new golden age. The National Cathedral, on the other hand, is looking backward to a waning era of bitter partisanship. As President Trump noted after the prayer service on Truth Social, the bishop aligned herself with a “giant crime wave” and a tragic mental health crisis.
Experiencing the worst year-over-year drop in membership in 2023, and coming in at just 1.6 million members today, the Episcopal Church can no longer claim to have the public trust.
The Protestant Episcopal Church of 1893 was a serious Christian and yes — national — institution. It could be trusted with the nation’s cathedral. But over succeeding generations, it sold that birthright to ever more progressive causes — causes its own membership, along with the American electorate — rejected.
By returning Mr. Trump to office, voters repudiated Bishop Budde and the out-of-touch class to which she belongs.
She should have had the good grace to accept that for the rebuke it was. Instead, she doubled down.
Bishop Budde has every right to speak her mind, but not from the pulpit that belongs to the people she despises. Congress should act now to revoke the cathedral’s charter so that it can’t happen again.
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