UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
BY ANTHEA BUTLER OCTOBER 2, 2015
Seems like the meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis was not as good for him as it was for her. In a statement released by the Vatican, approved by the pope, the Vatican stated “the Pope met with several people at the nunciature and that “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.”
Translation: “we got played, but this is not our game in the first place.”
The fact that the Vatican actually issued a statement after Vatican spokesman Fr. Lombardi said he wouldn’t comment is amazing enough. It would be a mistake, however, to make simplistic assumptions that either the Pope is in the tank for Kim Davis, that Liberty Counsel’s Mathew Staver’s version of the meeting is the truth, or that the Pope proved he was really a culture warrior who lied about everything he said in the US. To quote Facebook: it’s complicated.
While this feels like a break up between the Pope and all the great press he received for his welcoming tone in America, the truth is more complicated.
The best explication of what most likely happened has come from Charles Pierce in Esquire, who verified (correctly) that Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the nuncio, is the person who hastily arranged the meeting between the Pope and Kim Davis.
Archbishop Vigano is a Pope Benedict XVI supporter involved in the Vatileaks scandal. Vigano has lied about his own brother, with whom he is involved in a dispute about their considerable family inheritance. Or, to put it another way, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano is the Petyr Baelish of this particular iteration of Vatican “Game of Thrones.” The Archbishop decided to wade into the culture wars at the behest of parties yet unknown, or his own spite at being driven out of Rome.
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