On Sunday, Father Federico Lombardi and Father Thomas Rosica issued a joint statement disputing one of the claims Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò made in his recently published letter.
Their statement is based on a hand-written record of a meeting they had with Viganò.
Lombardi is the former director of the Holy See Press Office and Rodica his English-language assistant.
Viganò claims Francis knew well who Kim Davis was, and that the Vatican hierarchy approved in advance the controversial meeting Francis had with her on 24 September 2015 during the papal visit to the United States.
He also claimed that, when summoned to Rome urgently after news of the meeting leaked, the pope had nothing but praise for his efforts in organising the trip.
Rosica transcribed what he said were handwritten notes from a meeting he and Lombardi had with Viganò the evening after Viganò’s meeting with Francis.
He quoted verbatim the former nuncio as telling them: “The Holy Father in his paternal benevolence thanked me for his visit to the USA but also said that I had deceived him [in] bringing that woman to the nunciature.”
Viganò added, “The pope told me: ‘You never told me that she had four husbands.’”
Father Lombardi confirmed Rosica’s record of the meeting as “reliable.”
According to their statement, Lombardi and Rosica showed Viganò what the media had reported, and Rosica informed Viganò that “a journalist has a tape recording of you or one of the monsignors at the nunciature who phoned Davis at her hotel the evening before her meeting with the pope.”
Viganò was shocked at this and even more so when Rosica played the recording of a person at the nunciature telling Davis: “A vehicle will pick you and your lawyer up at the hotel tomorrow morning and bring you to the nunciature.
“Change your hairstyle so people will not recognize you so quickly.”
Rosica said no Holy See officials were involved in the drafting of the statement with Lombardi, but that he shared a copy of it with the Vatican secretary of state and foreign minister.
Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, had been briefly jailed for refusing to sign the marriage licences of homosexual couples seeking to register their marriages in the midst of a national debate in the United States about same-sex marriages.
The encounter created a media frenzy in the United States that threatened to overshadow the pope’s historic visit in September
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News category: World.
