UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
So the hugely damaging fallout from the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis has now provoked an unusual response-retraction of sorts from the Vatican media spokesperson Father Lombardi, who says that the pope is a characteristically kind and available man who meets with all sorts of persons (and isn’t that nice, but isn’t it interesting that his kindness and availibilty didn’t extend to a meeting with a single LGBT Catholic among many who asked to see him on his U.S. visit?) Father Lombardi’s brief account of the meeting makes it appear that Kim Davis was “one of several dozen persons” who simply happened to be bustled in front of the pope as he made preparations to leave D.C.
And it does further damage control by stating that the brief meeting with Ms. Davis (and her husband and Mat Staver) does not constitute endorsement of her understanding of religious freedom — though it’s rather difficult to put that disclaimer together with the pope’s words about religious freedom on the plane back to Rome, which seemed precisely to be endorsing her version of religious freedom without naming her.
Here’s what I think as one of the tiny peons far removed from Vatican politics or the heady universe of the heterosexual old boys (of both genders, in some cases) who spin the pope for the rest of us in the Catholic media, along with his clerical spinmeisters: I think the Vatican is in damage-control mode after news of the meeting with the Davises and Mat Staver of the anti-gay hate group Liberty Counsel was leaked. And it now intends to throw the Davises and Mr. Staver to the wolves, without really telling us the full story of what happened.
The statement by Lombardi that this meeting does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of everything that Kim Davis stands for, and the attempt to represent the meeting as the brief encounter of a kind, avuncular pope with a bunch of people he hardly knew, may be the closest we’ll ever get to the “truth” of what happened here.
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