UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
When I told you yesterday that I’d be very surprised if Pope Francis did not have direct knowledge of Kim Davis’s case, little did I know I’d wake up to an email inbox full of messages sending me articles which are now reporting that the pope met secretly with Kim Davis on his U.S. visit. Laurie Goodstein is reporting about the meeting at today’s New York Times, for instance. As she notes, the report that Pope Francis had a secret meeting with Kim Davis comes from Vatican reporter Robert Moynihan at his Inside the Vatican site. That site is returning an error message as I write this posting, but one of the email friends who sent me information about this story early today has sent me a copy of Moynihan’s report.
It says that Kim Davis’s parents are Catholics (something I had not yet seen reported elsewhere), that the pope met with her and her husband and gave them each a rosary, which they intend to give to her parents. Moynihan’s report also says the pope told Kim Davis to stay strong. Moynihan interprets this meeting as the pope wrapping his “protective mantle” around Kim Davis.
Laurie Goodstein reports that a spokesman for the Vatican, Rev. Ciro Benedettini, has said he will not either confirm or deny whether such a meeting occurred. According to Alex Dobuzinskis and Philip Pullella at Reuters, the Vatican spokesman was Father Federico Lombardi.
The Reuters report says that Kim Davis’s attorney Mat Staver of the anti-gay hate group Liberty Counsel told CBS News about the meeting last evening. The involvement of Staver in this report introduces an unfortunate wrinkle in this story, since he has just been proven to have been involved in shopping around a whopping lie about a prayer rally in support of Kim Davis that he claimed had taken place in Peru recently — and which did not take place. Zack Ford summarizes that story at Think Progress.
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