US President Joe Biden was moved to tears on Friday during a stop at a Catholic shrine when he discovered that a chaplain there had performed last rites for his late son Beau Biden.
“It was incredible to see him,” Biden said later during remarks at the foot of a cathedral in nearby Ballina. “It seemed like a sign.”
Knock Shrine is a pilgrimage site where, according to Catholic lore, the saints Mary, Joseph and John the Evangelist appeared near a stone wall in 1879. Biden touched the remaining old wall and toured the site with priest Father Richard Gibbons.
Gibbons said he discovered earlier in the day that Father Frank O’Grady working at the site was the same one who’d performed last rites, a ceremony in the Catholic faith that spiritually prepares people for death, for Beau.
It’s common in the Catholic faith for priests to move around to different posts during their lives in the church.
O’Grady is a former US Army chaplain and was formerly assigned to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where Beau died in 2015 from brain cancer at the age of 46.
Gibbons said he did not know about the Biden connection until Friday.
(With inputs from AP)
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