Yesterday Washington Episcopal “Bishop” Mariann Edgar Budde’s “lectored” a captive Donald Trump and J.D. Vance during her National Cathedral sermon (“lectored” is my neologism: “lecture” plus “hector”). Budde pressed the President and Vice President to show “mercy” to “LGBT” children and immigrants who “pick our crops and clean our buildings.” (How ante-bellum!) “Mercy” here apparently means agreeing with them. Budde’s lectoring recalled Sr. Theresa Kane, the nun designated to welcome then-Pope John Paul II to Washington in 1979 on behalf of women religious. Kane instead used the opportunity to lector the Pope about women’s ordination (using the usual buzz words).

The usual suspects immediately took to social media to applaud Budde. Jesuit James Martin highlighted her appeal for “LGBTQ people and migrants.” Papal scrivener Austen Ivereigh went further, proclaiming the “Episcopalian bishop spoke with parrhesia — apostolic courage — to Trump and Vance.” Inasmuch as there are no valid orders in Anglicanism among men, much less women, she could hardly speak with “apostolic” anything, but maybe this was one of those “conversations in the Spirit” that appears to be the Third Person’s latest tongue, conveniently manifesting itself during the Francis pontificate.

The usual chorus of “speaking truth to power” arose, one commentator even comparing Budde to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed 80 years ago this April. Pace all the Leftists who throw around the other “f” word (“fascist”) with glee, the comparison is hardly apt. After all — visions of sour plums dancing in their heads notwithstanding — Ms. Budde will sit down peacefully to dinner tonight. Trump didn’t go back to the White House and ask Barron, Bannon, and the boys, “Who will rid me of this troublesome priestess?” Unlike Thomas Becket, she’ll be undisturbed to say her Vespers. She might even watch herself on PBS. One thing for sure: she will not be spirited away in the night. There is no gallows in her future. So, drop the martyrdom appropriations.

And as far as “speaking truth to power” goes, ever notice how the Left — including the theological Left — will babble about “my truth” and “your truth” and the “dialogue for truth” until their truth is spoken, at which time it is laid down with a self-certainty that would have made Thomas Aquinas (if he ever lacked that much humility) blush and outdo Josef Ratzinger in denouncing the dictatorship of relativism.

No, dears, you are not crypto-martyrs and brave souls proclaiming unpopular truths to a blinkered world. Mother Teresa did that when she told the Clintons and Gores to their faces at a Prayer Breakfast that a society that kills its unborn children is a truly impoverished one. I dare you to do that, starting with the truth your target declared himself in his inaugural address: there are men, there are women, and there is nothing else. “Male and female He created them; and He saw it was ‘very good.’”

No, you are privileged people who use that privilege to advance your cause with a spritz of holy water and a whiff of incense, because almost everybody likes smells-and-bells. You use that privilege to hold presidents and popes hostage while you lector them about what they should be doing according to you. It’s double standards, the same ones that endorse this kind of “speaking truth to power” while silently passing the expectation to Catholic prelates not to say the Holy Name of Jesus in a public prayer.

I happen to walk through Georgetown University Hospital a couple times a year. There’s a corridor of photographs that depict the Hospital yesterday and today: current staff on one wall, historic pictures on the other. The pictures include the Kennedys in chapel and Harry Truman dedicating a building. They also include a picture of a nun arriving in an ambulance with a crowd of nuns ready to receive their patient. Another shows a nun simply at a desk, talking to a visitor. One fact strikes me: traditional nuns were into medicine and education. Those are not insignificant vocations. They shaped and built whole generations of American Catholics. They were not “staying home and baking cookies.” And with that vital work by female religious, Catholic institutions in America thrived.

After U.S. Catholic female religious life was “renewed” and “reformed,” the sister nurses and sister teachers disappeared. Instead we got “nuns on the bus” and priestess wannabes. Instead of a bridge between Church and world — arguably Vatican II’s vision for Catholics — they became aspirant politicians of the sanctuary. And they disappeared.

Among my research projects is writing a book on the Catholic Polish contribution to the Church in New Jersey. When I go back to old stats, I notice how many nuns were staffing Catholic parochial elementary and secondary schools (yes, there were parish high schools). Now those orders are shadows of what they were. The Felicians, who once had seven or eight American provinces as they served the Polish-American community, now have one, its numbers large enough to add “last one standing, please turn off the lights.”

Some may see my criticisms of Budde and Kane as “anti-women.” I am not, but I do raise a question about humility connected with ministerial service. It is absolutely not about “me.” Apparently some individuals and institutions think the normative pattern of ministry received from Christ and lived in the Church for millennia is somehow “outmoded” and “time-conditioned.” That such priests/priestesses think they have better insight than Christ and His Church to revise God’s designs makes me doubt other “truths” they speak as supposedly divinely warranted. There’s just no humility there.

Time-honored religious women’s vocations served in teaching and medicine were of great significance to concrete human lives. But all that was discarded, and now previously great religious orders turn into retirement homes and hospices, not for the faithful but for their own members. The orders went that way when, instead of humble service, we got self-anointed prophets speaking their “truth to power.” Except few folks are listening.