Update to 'Bergoglio Didn't Know Who Kim Davis "Really Was," but He Sure Knew Who Emma Bonino Was!'

I posted about Francis being unfamiliar with Kim Davis yesterday. Since then, it has come to my attention that the NY Times has published an article showing that Francis was fully briefed before hand, except for the fact of her multiple 'marriages'.

I find it ironic that Francis is fine with Catholics in adulterous 'marriages' committing sacrilege by receiving Holy Communion, but is upset by a non-Catholic entering into similar 'marriages'.

From the NYT

ROME — Retaliating against a remarkable campaign from within the church to force the ouster of Pope Francis, the Vatican’s former spokesman issued a statement on Sunday night questioning the credibility of an archbishop who has accused Francis of covering up sexual misconduct.

But in seeking to defend the pope against the latest allegations, which relate not to abuse but to the pope’s own credibility, the former spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, seemed to confirm a key part of the archbishop’s claims. And the defense also offered a portrait of the pope and his top advisers as having been politically naïve.

In a letter released Friday, the archbishop, Carlo Maria Viganò, challenged the notion, put forward by Vatican officials and the pope, that he had ambushed Francis in 2015 by setting up a private meeting at the Vatican’s Washington embassy with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who became a conservative celebrity by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Archbishop Viganò said in the letter that he had fully briefed Francis and his top advisers, all of whom he named, about Ms. Davis and her “conscientious objection” to promoting same-sex marriage. He received approval from them all, he said.

On Sunday, Father Lombardi issued a joint statement with the Rev. Thomas Rosica, who has also spoken for the Vatican in the past, making note of “the fact that Viganò had spoken the night before the meeting (with Kim Davis) with the pope and his collaborators and had received a consensus.”

Father Lombardi and Father Rosica nevertheless said Francis had felt “deceived” by Archbishop Viganò. Contrary to the claims of the archbishop, they said, the pope was furious over the meeting, which threatened to eclipse the entire visit to the United States by derailing his message of inclusion.

Archbishop Viganò, they assert, told them the pope had said he felt deceived about Ms. Davis. But the reason apparently had less to do with her role in the fight against gay marriage than with her own marital history.

“You never told me that she had four husbands,” the pope protested, Archbishop Viganò told them, they wrote.

Archbishop Viganò, who was the Vatican’s ambassador in the United States, or papal nuncio, declined a request for comment Sunday night.

The disagreement over what Francis did or did not know about Ms. Davis emerged after a week of turmoil in the Roman Catholic Church that began when Archbishop Viganò published a letter accusing the pope of covering up sexual abuse.

The archbishop claimed that Francis had known about accusations that an American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians long before they became public, but still allowed him an influential role at the Vatican.

The claim set off a rare onslaught of attacks on a sitting pope from conservative Catholics who have chafed under Francis’ reign.

In his statement Sunday, Father Lombardi argued that whether the pope knew about the meeting with Ms. Davis beforehand or not, the blame for the fiasco that followed rested with Archbishop Viganò for having put the pope in a difficult position.

The consensus about granting the meeting with Ms. Davis, Father Lombardi writes, “did not detract from the responsibility of the initiative of the meeting with Kim Davis and the consequences were mainly of Viganò himself, who had evidently desired and prepared them, and that as nuncio should have known better about this situation.”

Father Lombardi said the meeting had been “organized by the nuncio, who inserted it in the context of the pope’s many and quick greetings at his departure from the nunciature, as the Vatican Embassy in Washington is known. This certainly did not allow the pope and his collaborators to realize the significance of this meeting.”