"But at least this pope guy isn't like that awful one he replaced..."

(Ooops.
I put that heading in quotes, and no one actually said that.
Well, I said it, but I was being sarcastic, mocking the position taken by... never mind.)
But.....
Seriously?

On one fringe of the Catholic cloth, and one side of the political divide, I believe, on very little evidence, a writer puts a particular construction on an event.
On another, a different slant is put on that event, by means of putting a particular construction on words from an unnamed source, some of which may or may not have supported that construction, since after using direct quotes, we lapsed into free indirect speech, a style much beloved of writers of fiction or those wishing to put their own slant on matters that actual quotes would not support.
On the basis of that, still others claim that one person involved in the event is a liar. 
Which may be, but it would be unfair, actually impossible to say so with no more evidence than someone else's misconstruction, and I don't see anywhere that any particular thing the woman so accused said is contradicted by anyone in a position to know.
The only "official" statement actually speaks more to the various construction various partisans are putting on the event rather than anything the woman in question said.
A semi-official spokesman who previously admitted he knew nothing about it, was nonetheless bravely willing to go on record of how it "would" have been, how it must have happened even though, um... he wasn't told and wasn't there.

 the pope would have been given a list of people who were invited to bid him farewell as he departed Washington, but was unaware of the details of the... case or any possible implications of the meeting.

Furthermore, this semi-official, rumored-to-be-litigious, spokesperson,

"believed the pope would have been given a list of names of the several dozen people who were invited to the embassy to bid farewell as he left Washington, but was unaware of the details of [the]case or any possible implications of the meeting."

But he was glad to,

"hypothesize that the reception amounted to a receiving line-type event, with people in various rooms [hm, how many in each room?] on the first floor of the embassy to greet the pope and receive a rosary from him.

And while in the official statement we read only,

The only real audience granted by the Pope at the nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.

... everyone upset about right-wingers making too much of this other meet-and-greet are dancing with glee and putting up billboards at the Vatican's thereby affirming... um, former students, (that's all anyone not "reading into" it would get from the official statement.)

But apparently besides being a "former student" (is that the pc term for such people?) this person engages in homosexual activity.

The Rev. James Martin, editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America, had cautioned in an article this week that the pope meets many well-wishers on his trips, and that news of the meeting... had been manipulated.

“I was very disappointed to see the pope having been used that way, and that his willingness to be friendly to someone was turned against him,” Father Martin said in an interview on Friday. “What may originally have prevented them from issuing a statement was the desire not to give this story too much air. But what they eventually came to realize was that they needed to correct some gross misrepresentations of what had happened. It shows that Pope Francis met with many people on the trip, and that she was simply another person who he tried to be kind to.”

Not sure if he's talking about the gay guy here or the other dealio, (do the young folk still say that?) but I assume his principles apply equally.

And let me see, has Pope Francis ever said any little thing that his handlers and spokespeople have had to, I dunno, "walk back" a bit?

Maybe once or twice.

Oh, dear, I have gone on....

Because what I really asked, SERIOUSLY???!?!??? about, was this piece of idiocy, which provoked my title -

"Nobody in the Catholic Church wants another Regensburg,” said [some assistant professor at some college.] He was referring to the backlash after Pope Benedict XVI, Francis’ predecessor, gave a speech in Regensburg, Germany, that appeared to denigrate Islam.

“This was not as serious as Regensburg, when Benedict read his own speech,”[the sometime writer for HuffPo and America]  said about the meeting ... “But the pope has to be able to rely on his own system, and in this case the system failed him. The question is, was it a mistake, or was it done with full knowledge of how toxic she was?”

What's the Italian for nincompoop?

The meeting ... was clearly a misstep, [the Italian professor] said, “because the whole trip to the United States he very carefully didn’t want to give the impression that he was being politicized by any side.”

He added, “And this thing is the most politicized thing that you can imagine.”

Let's see, what can I say, without using inappropriate language?

Oh, I know...

"______ "