What happened to mercy?; The Washington Post, November 13, 2025

 Thomas Banchoff , The Washington Post; What happened to mercy?

"Decades ago, Pope John Paul II made a plea for mercy. His 1980 encyclical “Dives in Misericordia” (“Rich in Mercy”) emphasized God’s forgiving love toward humanity and decried a widespread tendency to “remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy.” Instead of mercy, John Paul saw a rise in “spite, hatred and even cruelty.”

Mercy is painfully scarce in our politics today. When the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, appealed to President Donald Trump from the pulpit in January to show mercy toward the vulnerable, the president bristled and demanded an apology. In the months since, his administration’s policies have been rife with cruelty, from eliminating life-giving aid programs abroad to threatening to withhold food assistance for more than 40 million Americans."

What happens after you ask Trump to ‘have mercy’? Threats, praise and hope.; The Washington Post, February 2, 2025

  Olivia George, The Washington Post; What happens after you ask Trump to ‘have mercy’? Threats, praise and hope.

"Last month, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) introduced a resolution calling for the House to recognize Budde’s sermon as a “display of political activism and condemning its distorted message.”

Budde, according to the resolution, promoted “political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching.”

On Sunday, after the service, she pondered the lawmaker’s action.

“It isn’t political activism for a pastor to ask for mercy,” she said. “It is an expression of Christian faith and the teachings of Jesus.”"

Some Protestants Felt Invisible. Then Came Bishop Budde.; The New York Times, January 26, 2025

 Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Some Protestants Felt Invisible. Then Came Bishop Budde.

"It was the first Sunday since a fellow Episcopalian, Bishop Mariann E. Budde, delivered a sermon that many observers heard as an echo of passages like the one from Luke. Speaking at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration, she faced the president and made a direct plea: “Have mercy.”

After the service, Mr. Trump called Bishop Budde a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” in a social media post. His foes immediately hailed her as an icon of the resistance. But for many progressive Christians and their leaders, the confrontation was more than a moment of political catharsis. It was about more than Mr. Trump. It was an eloquent expression of basic Christian theology, expressed in an extraordinarily public forum...

“A plea for mercy, a recognition of the stranger in our midst, is core to the faith,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, the Episcopal Church’s top clerical leader, said in an interview. “It is radical, given the order of the world around us — it is countercultural — but it’s not bound to political ideology.”...

The clergy members addressed it directly in their sermons, too. At Church of the Transfiguration, the associate rector, the Rev. Ted Clarkson, acknowledged to the congregation that aspects of the bishop’s sermon might have been “hard to hear.” But “mercy is truth,” he said, “and I expect a bishop to preach the truth.” (Bishop Budde preached on Sunday at a church in Maryland.)...

Bishop Budde’s message seemed to be resonating beyond the usual audience for Sunday sermons.

Her most recent book, “How We Learn to Be Brave,” was listed as temporarily out of stock on Amazon Friday afternoon. At that time, the book was No. 4 on the site’s list of best-sellers, 11 spots above Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” 

The publisher of Bishop Budde’s book, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Books, was scrambling to reprint “a significant number of books,” said Tracy Behar, Avery’s president and publisher."