Kim Davis, county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who was famously jailed for five days in September for refusing to grant marriage licences to homosexuals, had a “religious awakening” in 2011. 

Her personal history is so complex, it could have found its way into a Friends subplot. Four marriages and three divorces (in 1994, 2006 and 2008). Henry VIII had only two divorces.

Davis’s mother-in-law (one of them) asked her to go to church as her ‘dying wish’, and she did. And she continues to go: three times a week. She stopped wearing make-up and jewelry, and started wearing dresses that descend below the knee — all in obedient keeping with the Apostolic Pentecostal congregation’s tenets on ‘external holiness’. 

If nothing else, I’d ship these Pentecostals over to Rome and put them in charge of the dress code to enter St. Peter’s Basilica. Call it my contribution to the ecumenical movement.

Davis even held weekly Bible classes for women inmates in a local prison. Interestingly, Davis was actually elected as a Democrat, but as of Sept. 25, switched to the Republicans.

Heroic witness isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. 

I do recognise that the 1.1 billion who ‘identify’ as Catholic more or less merge into the average statistics of the general population on the hot-button issues as though they had no faith at all. I fully realise, short of a divine miracle, that they’re not all going to be transformed overnight into Cardinal Burke. 

If heroic witness were normal, it wouldn’t be called heroic.

Why has the Catholic Church spent decades militantly cultivating the Pentecostals and the Evangelicals, not to mention the Orthodox, if — if truth be told — we don’t actually like what they stand for and what differentiates them, in term of beliefs, from the average Catholic?

What exactly do we want when we dialogue with our separated brethren? “Forget about all this God’s law stuff. Booooring! Soooo last millennium! You should be championing social justice issues instead!” Is that really what our endgame is? “Come on in and try our soggy mush — you won’t want to go back!”

Do we not care about the reasons why Catholics leave the Catholic Church in order to find Christ outside His own Church?

Kim Davis’ parents are both Catholics. 

One wonders if, had Davis found her conversion in the arms of Holy Mother Church (one assumes the Church of her youth), she would still have had the formation to take this truly heroic stand. It is easy to see how in a parallel universe, Kim Davis might currently be — instead of lamenting in prison for standing firm to God’s holy law — suffering adoring editorials, approving of her calls for ever more climate-change action.

Which leads to the question no-one has yet asked: where are the Catholic Kim Davises? 

Expectations went up that perhaps Catholics might be encouraged to start taking on a more visible role regarding — well — traditionally Catholic morality when it emerged that the Pope received Kim Davis and her [fourth] husband in the US this week, but such hopes were soon dashed when the Vatican quickly clarified that it was only a line-up and that “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.”

In the same statement, the Vatican spokesman said, “The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.” The New York Times later identified the student as “Yayo Grassi, a gay man in Washington”, and said that his “family” included “his partner of 19 years.”

The contrast in characterization between this “real audience” and the “brief greeting” given to Kim Davis could not have been more stark.

Kim Davis was asked why she didn’t resign from her post, if she felt her conscience conflicting with her public duties. She responded that she had thought about it, but decided to stay: “And if I left, resigned or chose to retire, I would have no voice for God's word.” 

As Kim Davis said: “This has never been a gay or lesbian issue for me. This is about upholding the word of God. This is a heaven or hell issue for me and for every other Christian that believes…this is a fight worth fighting.

All Christians — Catholics and Protestants alike — should have no shame to stand with Kim Davis on this. And I strongly believe that there are many Catholics who want to find a way to show Kim Davis that they stand in solidarity with her, because they can see that she stands in solidarity with Christ.