Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, led the invocation on Monday at the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump in Washington, D.C.
Due to cold temperatures and snow in Washington on Sunday night, the ceremony was moved inside to the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
Cardinal Dolan quoted from both Psalm 46 and the Book of Wisdom in his two-minute invocation.
“Be still and know that I am God, supreme among the nations, supreme on the earth. Let us pray: remembering General George Washington on his knees at Valley Forge. Recalling Abraham Lincoln at his second inaugural, ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.’ Remembering General George Patton’s instructions to his soldiers as they began the Battle of the Bulge eight decades ago: ‘Pray. Pray when fighting, pray alone, pray with others, pray by night, pray by day.’ Observing the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King who warned, ‘Without God, our efforts turn to ashes.’ We, blessed citizens of this one nation under God, humbled by our claim that ‘in God we trust,’ gather on this Inauguration Day to pray. For our President Donald J. Trump, his family, his advisors, his cabinet, his aspirations, his vice president. For the Lord’s blessings upon Joseph Biden. For our men and women in uniform. For each other, whose hopes are stoked this new year, this Inauguration Day. We cannot err in relying upon that prayer from the Bible, upon which our president will soon place his hand in oath as we make our own supplications of King Solomon for wisdom, as he began his governance.
“‘God of our fathers in your wisdom you sent man to govern your creatures, to govern in holiness and justice, to render justice with integrity. Give our leader wisdom for he is your servant, aware of his own weakness and brevity of life. If wisdom, which comes from you be not with him, he shall be held in no esteem. Send wisdom from heaven that she may be with him, that he may know your designs. Please, God bless America. Please, mend her every flaw. You are the God in whom we trust who lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.”
Cardinal Dolan also said the opening prayer during President Trump’s 2017 inauguration, reading a different section of King Solomon’s prayer from the Book of Wisdom.
The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the late Rev. Billy Graham, followed Cardinal Dolan with an additional prayer before Vice President J.D. Vance and President Trump took their respective oaths of office.