The New York Times reported that during the visit with Davis and her husband, Joe, the pope "gave her rosaries and told her to `stay strong,'" according to Davis' lawyer Mat Staver, who has been gobbling up face time on the cable news channels, and, to borrow a phrase from the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, "has all the subtlety of a piano crashing onto the sidewalk."

Davis, an Apostolic Christian, a form of Pentecostal Christianity, was in the nation's capital to receive a "Cost of Discipleship" award from the Family Research Council, the powerful Washington, D.C. based "family values" lobbying group where Josh Duggar, Ashley Madison member in good standing, was recently employed.

Davis told Inside the Vatican's Robert Moynihan that "The Pope spoke in English. There was no interpreter. `Thank you for your courage,' Pope Francis said to me. I said, `Thank you, Holy Father.' I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. `Stay strong,' he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved. Then he said to me, `Please pray for me.' And I said to him, `Please pray for me also, Holy Father.' And he assured me that he would pray for me."

"Pope Francis' secret meeting with Kim Davis is a reminder that this pope, no matter how much he may sound a progressive note on income equality and climate change, remains wedded to a regressive vision of social issues -- and these are the issues that really count because they drive the church's lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., Rob Boston, Director of Communications for the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me in an email.  

"Moderate and progressive Catholics who had dreamed of change on issues like access to birth control, the role of women in the church and inclusion of LGBT men and women are quickly finding their hopes dashed. The meeting [with Davis] is a signal that Francis is not a visionary and lacks a true reformist spirit. In other words, when it comes to culture war issues, we can expect more of the same from Francis and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. It's disappointing but not surprising."

Mat Staver, who said that the meeting had been arranged through the Vatican and not through bishops or the bishops' conference in the United States, told The New York Times that he was soon expecting photographs from the meeting.

Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, "confirmed the meeting, but he declined to elaborate.," the Times reported. "I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no other comments to add," he said.

"In his public addresses in the United States, the pope spoke in broad strokes about the importance of religious freedom," The New York Times Laurie Goodstein pointed out. On the plane trip home, Terry Moran of ABC News asked him about government officials who refused to perform their duties because of religious objections to same-sex marriage.

"Conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right. Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right, a human right. Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying `this right that has merit, this one does not.' It (conscientious objection) is a human right."

"Would that include government officials as well?" Moran asked.

"It is a human right and if a government official is a human person, he has that right," the pope said. "It is a human right."

Why the Secrecy?

According to Inside The Vatican's Robert Moynihan, the pope's visit with Davis and her husband may have been "the most significant meeting, symbolically, of the entire trip."

Why the need for secrecy?

According to Moynihan, had information about the meeting become public, it could have sparked a controversy that Vatican officials, already stung by criticism of Junipero Serra's canonization, were hoping to avoid.

With the possibility of Davis facing further jail time, Moynihan speculates that the Pope "'wrapped his protective mantle' around Kim Davis, discreetly, in private, in a way completely hidden from the world, but in a way that was deeply moving for her personally, as a person of conscience."

Staver's Opportunism

According to Americans United's Rob Boston, "Mat Staver's Liberty Counsel, although dwarfed by larger Religious Right groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, has carved out a niche for itself by taking on Kim Davis' case even though it's an obvious loser in court.

Boston, who has been monitoring Staver's Liberty Counsel since it was founded in 1989, pointed out that Staver's "view is a common one among the Religious Right -- privilege for fundamentalist Christians and second-class status for everyone else. Staver's legal thinking is anchored in what he wishes the Constitution says as opposed to what it actually does say.

"I suspect Staver knew he could never win Davis' case in court, but in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling on marriage equality, he was determined to create a martyr -- and he found the perfect one in Davis. I'm sure Staver will use Davis' case to raise money and increase Liberty Counsel's public profile, but the courts aren't with him, and increasingly the American people aren't as well. The sooner his 15 minutes of fame are up, the better off our nation will be."