The Vatican has distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, the controversial Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licences to same sex couples for religious reasons, saying the recent meeting between the two ought not to be seen as a “form of support of her position”.

In a short statement that the church said would provide an “objective understanding of what transpired”, the Vatican also downplayed the significance of the encounter, saying Davis was one of “several dozen persons” who had been invited by the Vatican’s ambassador to the US in Washington. The only “real audience” the pope had granted during that period, the Vatican said, was to his former students and family.

It was a stunning decision by the Vatican to break its silence on the meeting with Davis, days after it said it would not discuss the matter. It is likely to reflect a view that – for various reasons – Davis is not necessarily a model of the “conscientious objector” that Francis has generally endorsed and a concern on the part of the Vatican that the controversial meeting threatened to overshadow the pope’s otherwise hugely successful trip to the US.

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“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,” the Vatican said in a statement.

While the Vatican is staunchly opposed to gay marriage, the statement will inevitably be viewed by some proponents of LGBT rights as an important gesture, because the church clearly does not want to be seen as linking arms with Davis.

The pope in 2013 said “who am I to judge?” when asked about the existence of a “gay lobby” within the church, but he has otherwise not made any big public gestures that would be seen as extending tolerance toward gay Catholics.

Conservatives who saw the meeting with Davis as a victory following the pope’s tour of the US, which did not include any blatant criticism of the passage of gay marriage rights or abortion, are likely to be very disappointed by the Vatican’s statement.

News of the meeting between the pope and Davis was met with shock among many progressives and non-Catholics, but also with puzzlement, because it seemed to contradict the general tone of the pope’s US tour, in which he emphasised the need to care for the environment and immigrants. His message to US bishops centred much more on the need for them to show mercy to the faithful, rather than constantly barraging people with church doctrine.



Davis is a highly divisive figure in the US who has been hailed by religious conservatives as a symbol of the Obama administration’s alleged war on religious freedom. But for others, she is seen as an anti-gay bigot. Francis had allegedly told Davis to “stay strong” in his meeting with her, according to reported comments by her attorney, and gave Davis and her husband two rosaries.

But now the Vatican has essentially put any lingering questions about the pope’s views about Davis to rest, suggesting that she was not necessarily a model of the pope’s views on “conscientious objectors”. On the plane home from Philadelphia, Francis had been asked about the Davis case, although the journalist asking the question had not mentioned her by name.



At the time, Francis did not seem overly familiar with the case or with Davis – which prompted questions after it emerged that the two had met – but nevertheless reinforced the idea that he believed it was a human right of government officials to object to a duty if they believed it was against their faith.

While some papal experts had concluded that the pope’s meeting with Davis represented an endorsement of her role as a conscientious objector – because she went to jail for five days after refusing to fulfil her duties – the author Michael Sean Winters dismissed those arguments.

In a piece published on Thursday and widely discussed among Vatican experts, Winters argued in an article for National Catholic Reporter that Davis was not, in fact, a conscientious objector, because she not only refused to grant marriage licenses in her office in Kentucky (even though same sex couples have the constitutional right to marry), but she also forbade clerks working under her to do so.

“Davis was not jailed for practicing her religion. She was jailed for forcing others to practise her religion,” Winters wrote.