Pope Francis met 'anti-gay' Kentucky clerk Kim Davis

Pope Francis allegedly thanked Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licences on religious grounds, for her courage when the pair had a private meeting during his trip to the US.

The Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said he would not deny the meeting took place, but said he had no other comments to add.

The encounter will likely be seen as a personal endorsement of Davis’s actions by the Argentinian pontiff, and seems to contradict the general tone of the pope’s public remarks during his tour of the US, when he avoided issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and emphasised the need for mercy and goodwill.

Although some religious conservatives hailed Davis as “a modern-day Martin Luther King”, who was willing to endure five days of jail for her faith, many other Americans saw her defiance as an act of anti-gay bigotry and a dangerous refusal to respect the law.

Francis reportedly met Davis and her husband, Joe, at the Vatican’s Washington embassy on Thursday, according to Liberty Counsel, a Christian lobby group.

A statement on the website carries the stamp of the Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman, Mat Staver, who is acting as Davis’s lawyer in her dispute with the court. Liberty Counsel is considered one of 18 hardline anti-gay propaganda groups by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which closely monitors hate speech.

An online Catholic news site called Inside The Vatican, edited by Robert Moynihan, was the first to report the alleged meeting. It said the pope thanked Davis for her courage and told her to stay strong. As is customary in many of his personal meetings, he then reportedly asked Davis to pray for him and presented both her and her husband with a rosary, the Liberty Counsel claimed.

Davis is quoted as saying she was humbled by the experience. “I never thought I would meet the pope. Who am I to have this rare opportunity? I am just a county clerk who loves Jesus and desires with all my heart to serve him.

“Pope Francis was kind, genuinely caring, and very personable,” her statement continued. “He even asked me to pray for him. Pope Francis thanked me for my courage and told me to ‘stay strong’.”

The pontiff was asked by a reporter on his return flight from Philadelphia to Rome whether a government official could refuse to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples and claim it was a religious right. Although Davis’s name was not mentioned, it was clearly a reference to the controversy surrounding her objection, which in the US prompted a debate about the limits of religious freedom.

Francis began his answer by saying that he could not “have in mind all cases that can exist about conscientious objection”. He did not say whether he had met Davis. He did elaborate by saying he believed that such religious-based objections were a “human right”, but did not delve into the precise issue of same-sex marriage.

When the Guardian spoke to Staver last week, the activist and attorney said he knew the pope was “personally following the Kim Davis situation”. Asked how he knew, Staver replied: “I just know, trust me, I just know. He is very aware of it, and no doubt his comments [in his Congress address, about religious liberty] refer to that, and also Obamacare. These issues are certainly behind his comments.”

For now, the Vatican is not shedding any light on why the pope would have met Davis and why it would have chosen to keep the meeting secret, but Francis sought to avoid any meetings that could be interpreted as controversial during his trip to Cuba and the US. He declined, for example, to meet with Cuban dissidents.

The surprise news of the meeting will raise eyebrows within the Vatican bureaucracy – where press leaks can serve the interests of one faction or another – because it was revealed just days before a meeting of bishops to discuss issues related to the family.

The synod of bishops will pit conservative forces within the church against more progressive officials, who are trying to get the church to adopt a more lenient approach on issues concerning divorce and the treatment of children of gay couples.

If Francis was trying to portray an image of a pope that was floating above America’s culture wars, his apparent meeting with Davis puts him right back on the battleground.

Andrew Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the apparent meeting with Davis, coupled with his remarks on the plane, put the pope “squarely in the camp of conservative Christians in the US, both Catholic and Protestant, who believe their faith has been persecuted during the presidency of Obama”.

He added: “One of the great ironies is that Kim Davis’s Pentecostal faith has historically viewed Catholicism as an idolatrous abomination of Christianity. In the pope’s Latin America, one of the first things many Catholic converts to Pentecostalism do is to make a bonfire to incinerate their Catholic ‘idols’, such as the saints and Virgin Mary.”