Kim Davis and Pope Francis’s Grand Strategy, by Ross Douthat, New York Times (September 30, 2015)

It appears we have a backhanded, non-denial version of Vatican confirmation of the story that Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk briefly jailed for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was received by Pope Francis privately during his visit to the United States. (For the story to be false, the Davises would have needed to be pathological liars and someone in Rome would need to have baldly lied to the well-sourced Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican, so it was already reasonable to treat the news as basically confirmed.) This is a fairly surprising bit of news; it also lends some credence to Philip Lawler’s interpretation of this pope’s approach to the American culture war, which he offered after Francis’s address in Washington last week:

An alternative reading, which I offered in Sunday’s column, would interpret this tendency to be oblique about abortion and marriage and explicit about immigration and the death penalty as a straightforward sign that Francis cares a little more about the latter issues, and that his stresses reflect his own sensibility and priorities as much as they do a carefully-conceived grand strategy.

But these readings aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s no question that outreach to the lost sheep/younger brother has been a core element of Francis’s approach since the beginning, and when you combine his visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor with the reception of and apparent encouragement of Davis, you are left with a sense that the pope felt like he could deliver a message to conservative Catholics quietly, implicitly, obliquely and symbolically … even as his public words, in the congressional speech especially, offered more overt outreach to the liberal religious and the secular center-left.

Whether this calculation is wise or correct is another question. For my own part, I think a more explicit critique of American liberalism’s recent drift on both abortion and religious freedom in the papal speech to Congress, inserted somewhere in between the more Nancy Pelosi-friendly passages, would actually have been better received by persuadable fence-sitters than a “private” but inevitably public meeting with a controversial figure whose religious liberty claim is considerably weaker than other claims that the Vatican needs to defend. From a strategic perspective, meeting with Davis seems calculated to give maximal symbolic offense to the American left and center without delivering a clear message in Francis’s own, often-eloquent voice; it challenges the left’s “progressive pope” narrative and reminds us all that the pope is still Catholic, but in a Twitter-friendly, #hottake-generating way, which I’m not really sure serves any of this pontificate’s larger goals.

Of course the strategic reading, too, may be overthinking things; Francis has “a spirit of encounter” and talks a lot about “going to the peripheries,” he really likes evangelicals and Pentecostalists, he’s met with people at the opposite culture-war pole from Davis, and the Vatican is not always perfectly clued-in about the complexities of American politics. And with a mercurial, unpredictable, often deliberately-ambiguous pontiff, “he likes to keep people guessing” and “he just likes to meet people” are both sometimes reasonable interpretations of moves that otherwise seem hard to figure out.

And whatever else comes of it — speaking as someone who disagrees with her position but also knows well that I might never have the courage to be jailed for any of my beliefs — I hope it was a blessing for Kim Davis and her husband.