Bishop Budde helped lay gay hate crime victim to rest: 'His death was a wound on our nation' [View all]

It turns out Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde – who begged Donald Trump to show mercy to LGBTQ+ children and immigrants during a powerful sermon this week – was the bishop who interred the ashes of hate crime victim Matthew Shepard, 20 years after his death.

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In 2018, 20 years after Shepard was killed, he was interred at Washington National Cathedral, with the service overseen by Budde. It took place after Shepard’s mother reached out to the cathedral to ask about the possibility of interring her son’s ashes there.

The cathedral is also the resting place of blind and deaf advocate Helen Keller and former US president Woodrow Wilson.

“His death was a wound on our nation,” Bishop Budde told The New York Times at the time. “We are doing our part to bring light out of that darkness and healing to those who have been so often hurt, and sometimes hurt in the name of the church.”

“It’s a place where there’s an actual chance for others to sit and reflect about Matthew, and about themselves, and about their friends,” Shepard’s father Dennis said of the cathedral.


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