Did the Pope bless Kim Davis’ beliefs? About as much as Mark McGwire bat!

Talk about some serious media mismanagement; how else to explain the fact that the Vatican is feeling compelled to come up with clarification after clarification about the “meeting” the Pope supposedly had with that county clerk from Kentucky who wants to be the heroine of the homophobic community.

Did it really happen?

For it seems that back when Pope Francis was in the United States last week, Kim Davis was one of a dozen people who were taken to the Vatican’s embassy in Washington.

SHE GOT A brief bit of face time, where Davis insists she was told by His Holiness himself that he told her to “stay strong” in her ongoing fight against people who expect her to fulfill her legal duties as clerk of Rowan County, Ky., by signing off on all marriage licenses.

Even those issued by gay couples wishing to have legal legitimacy added to their personal relationships.

Most of what has been spoken about this “meeting” has come from Davis. The woman who isn’t even Catholic (she’s part of an Apostolic faith) wants us to think she has the backing of one of the world’s leading religious faiths.

The Vatican, which likes to think it is above all these worldly considerations, initially came up with a “we can neither confirm nor deny” strategy in response to Davis and her followers’ antics.

IT LATER BECAME a “we confirm they met, but will not elaborate” type of response.
 

No longer the highlight of the papal visit

But even that was not enough to put to rest this issue. By Friday, a Vatican spokesman had to issue yet another clarification – providing scant details about an issue upon which the church usually thinks are no one else’s concern.

“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,” we were told. Then, we learned how the pope also greeted a gay couple and their friends during his tour -- the same amount of attention that Davis got.

Not that I expect this to put the issue to rest – there are those who are going to keep this issue alive for as long as possible. It may well be that it was people within the Catholic church hierarchy who arranged for Davis to even be on hand to see the Pope in Washington – perhaps those who want to push the church toward the ideologue side with regards to the gay marriage debate.

JUST BECAUSE THE courts may have ruled a certain way doesn’t mean there won’t be those wishing to overturn them. Abortion was decided by the courts to be a legitimate medical procedure more than four decades ago – yet the issue isn’t anywhere near going away.



A comparable moment to Kim Davis?

Now I’m not about to claim Davis is flat-out lying when she talks about her papal moment. Only that I realize being allowed into the pope’s presence shouldn’t be thought of as being a bigger deal than it really is.

I still remember in 1999 when Pope John Paul II came to St. Louis. One of the people he met with was then-St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire. They shook hands, and McGwire got to introduce his son, Matt, to the pope.

The whole incident lasted a few seconds before the pope moved on. Aside from creating the opportunity for some jokes about the pope meeting with a cardinal, it was just a brief tidbit.

YET IN A papal journey to the Americas that ventured into Havana and saw Pope Francis speak both at Madison Square Garden AND before Congress, there’s a very good chance that this trip will have as its lingering memory the few seconds that Davis worked her way to the front of the line and had papal face time. Then again, the pope’s visit also got upstaged by the death of one-time New York Yankees great Yogi Berra, so maybe the pope was going to struggle for top-billing.

His death put Pope on Pg. 14 of NY Post

By that definition of papal attention, perhaps I should consider my own ’99 moment – I was a United Press International reporter back then and I was in St. Louis for the John Paul II trip. At one point, I was watching a motorcade through the city and the pope was about 50 feet away from me when he looked in my direction and waved.

For his later mass at the now-former TWA Dome, I was relegated to another room and had to watch him speak via a video screen connection. Admittedly, Davis’ proximity to a Pope was better than I had.

But somehow, I think her experience was closer to mine than to a true papal audience – which is the impression some conservative ideologues seem to want to create. Which strikes me as a repulsive use of religion for one’s own beliefs!

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EXTRA: Were Chicago and Illinois the point of Ground Zero for baseball fraud?

I can remember sitting in the stands of New Comiskey Park in September 1998 watching the Chicago White Sox play Seattle when officials felt compelled to give scoreboard “updates” about the home runs being hit by Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.

It was a mixture of cheers and boos that came from the crowd, some of whom resented the way that Chicago Cubs fans tried to spin Sosa’s performance as some sort of imperical evidence that the White Sox were irrelevant to the city.

AFTER ALL, IT was the Cubs (they would claim) that were giving baseball its “big” story and helping to “save baseball” from the public relations mess it incurred from the strike of 1994-95 (the one that now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor ultimately ended in her New York courtroom).

So you have to excuse me if a part of my reaction to learning that McGwire is now admitting to what was long suspected (his strength came from chemical substances that are considered inappropriate to the mentality of true sportsmanship and athleticism) is to chuckle at the thought that the Cubs were ever deluded enough to think they were that important.

After all, McGwire now admits it and baseball officials in 2003 had a drug test that Sosa himself passed. The one time that he needed to fail, he didn’t.

I find it ironic that many of the self-appointed guardians of baseball of today who want the harshest, most punitive punishment for Sosa and McGwire sound a lot like White Sox fans circa '98.

WHAT ALSO STICKS in my mind is that in the Summer of ’98, I was living and working in Springfield, Ill., which meant I was more or less on the dividing line between Cubs fandom and St. Louis Cardinals fandom. (For some reason, downstate Illinois residents are mostly too ignorant to appreciate the superiority of the American League).

Every single moment that season got the locals all worked up because it was taken personal. There was none of this “I wish they could both break the record” sentiment. Everybody wanted their team’s guy to win, and the other to be humiliated.

But now that we have to recognize that it all was a fraud, what should we think of that season – and of baseball.

I have been one of those people who does not get as worked up over steroids because I figure the ballplayers who are taking them are doing more potential harm to their bodies and their health than any humiliation they might suffer from my heaping indignation upon them.

IN SHORT, THEY will get theirs some day. And I’m sure Sports Illustrated wishes it could take back this magazine cover.

It also reinforces in my mind the thought that the most interesting part of 1998 was the New York Yankees managing to set an American League record with 114 wins that season.

Even though the Seattle Mariners broke that record three years later (just like Barry Bonds came along to top McGwire/Sosa), their accomplishment doesn’t seem as big a deal as what came from the Bronx.

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