The Vatican is attempting to clear up what it says was a misunderstanding about the pope’s encounter with Kim Davis on his recent visit to the US.
Davis, the county clerk from Kentucky who ignited controversy by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, reportedly met Pope Francis at the Vatican embassy in Washington last week. News of this meeting emerged after the pope had left the US, and after he’d been asked, during his flight to Italy, whether he “supported individuals, including government officials, who refuse to abide by some laws, such as issuing marriage licenses to gays.”
The pope’s answer to that question, and subsequent reports from Kim Davis’s lawyer implying that Davis had been granted a private audience with the pope, suggested that the pontiff supported Davis’s controversial actions. American liberals and those who had cheered Pope Francis as a “progressive” were disappointed. Conservatives were heartened.
The Vatican would neither deny nor confirm these reports at the time. Today (Oct. 2), however, the Vatican announced that Davis’s encounter with Pope Francis was limited to a general greeting and that the details of her opposition to same-sex marriage, and the controversy surrounding her actions as a county clerk, had not been discussed at all. Davis was in a line of several dozen people the pope met at the Vatican embassy, according to Reuters.
And according to a statement from the Vatican: “The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”
Over at Esquire, writer Charles Pierce suggests the whole thing was a charade—that this is the kind of thing the pope’s enemies would do to “swindle” him:
…[If] you’re one of these people, and you’re looking to ratfck the pope’s visit to the United States, and to his agenda in general, you’d be looking to put him in a box. So, how would you do that?
Here’s what I’d do. I’d arrange for the pope to meet Davis, but not as an American culture war celebrity, but as a devout Christian whose faith is under vague assault. (I would not mention the three marriages or the fact that she took an oath before god to do her job. I mean, why burden the poor old fella with details, right?) I’d shuffle her through the process and she gets some vague words of encouragement from the pope, who otherwise doesn’t know her from any other hick who gets sent his way. I’d sit on the news for the entire rest of the pope’s trip, even enlisting Davis’s publicity-hungry legal team in that effort.
But as Quartz noted even before the papal visit to the US had ended, parsing Pope Francis’ stance on social issues is tricky work that might leave his more progressive fans disappointed.