If the idea of having Pope Francis meet with anti-same sex marriage activist Kim Davis during his recent visit to the US was an attempt to put a spanner in the works of his otherwise hugely successful visit, then it has almost certainly failed.
Let us recap. The pope's plane had hardly hit the tarmac back in Rome before news broke that during his visit he had a "secret" meeting at the Washington nunciature with Ms Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk who was briefly jailed last month following her refusal to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples. The pope, we were told, had thanked her for her "courage" and had told her to "stay strong".
Bombshell
Were this story true, as recounted, it would have been a bombshell in that it implied the pope had very heavily, but rather duplicitously, weighed in on the anti-gay side of the fence. The Catholic right pounced on the story, with US religious affairs magazine
Inside The Vatican
calling it a “secret” meeting that had been motivated by the pope’s “desire to meet with a person who has taken a controversial stand out of conscience”.
By the end of last week, however, the Vatican had strongly contradicted that version of events, calling the encounter “brief” and claiming that Ms Davis had been just one of a line of people who greeted the pope as he prepared to leave Washington for New York.
Furthermore, said the Holy See, the “brief encounter” should not in any way be “considered a form of support of her position”.
Curiously, the Vatican did add that the pope had just one private meeting at the nunciature. That mystery meeting turned out to be with Yayo Grassi, an old Argentine friend who just happens to be gay and who visited the pope in Washington with his partner, on the day before the meeting with Kim Davis. Furthermore, CNN had film footage of the encounter showing the pope and his old friend exchanging a hug.
At this point, it becomes impossible to paint the pope as some sort of secret homophobe (even if Catholic doctrine remains firmly opposed to same-sex marriage). One question remains, however. Why and by whom was Kim Davis invited to the nunciature in the first place?
A non-Catholic, four times married, with no obvious connection to the Catholic Church, she hardly looks like an obvious choice for an invitation to meet the pope. And that's before her role as controversial protagonist in a public row about same-sex marriage. So, did someone in the nunciature or in the North American church hierarchy want to embarrass the pope?
One thing seems more than clear, however – the whole incident has not altered the widespread perception that Pope Francis’s US visit was a huge success.
