A reader asks what I think of the Pope meeting Kim Davis

He writes:

I have great respect for your opinion and have been wondering what you think of the Kim Davis/Pope Francis meeting. The meeting itself doesn’t bother me, but the secrecy of it does. If I were on the other side of the marriage issue, I think I’d feel like the Pope was trying to pull one over on me.

I think the pope was being a shepherd. It’s what popes are supposed to do. I also, by the way, think that the Lefties who are grabbing themselves by both legs and tearing themselves in two over Francis’ “betrayal” are hilarious and provide the perfect bookend to the beginning of the week when Righties were doing the same. I’m particularly amused by one Charles Pierce, who thinks he has smoked out an entire Benedictine Conspiracy at work.

As to keeping the meeting private and this somehow being scandalous to the Left, my response to them would be “Mind your own business.” If a shepherd wants to meet with one of the sheep in private (and the sheep presumably wants that as well) who cares how it affect your precious feelings? I certainly wouldn’t want paparazzi following me into a meeting with my spiritual director or confessor.

What’s really ticking the Left off is that Francis showed that he meant business when he spoke of religious liberty. The Left is ticked because the goal had been to make an example of Davis pour encourager l’autres and the whole thing backfired. The judge who threw her in the pokey made a martyr of her instead of an example and the attempt to crush her conscience was thrwarted, first by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which demanded that reasonable accomodation be made to her conscience) and second by this pope, who said “Amen” to that and blessed acts of conscience. The subculture that somehow had managed to convince itself that the Pope was going to back down on conscience and genuflect to gay marriage was as outraged to discover the Pope was Catholic as the subculture of lunatics over in the comboxes at First Things having hysterics about “Che Guevara’s Pope”.