Washington D.C., Apr 14, 2023 / 16:20 pm
While visiting the Knock Shrine in Ireland on Friday, President Joe Biden had a tearful meeting with the priest who gave his son Beau his last rites nearly eight years ago before he succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 46.
The priest, Father Frank O’Grady, had administered the sacrament to Beau in 2015 while serving as a chaplain for the United States Army at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He now works at the Knock Shrine, the site of an 1879 Marian apparition in western Ireland.
Father Richard Gibbons, the rector of the shrine, told the BBC that the meeting was “spontaneous” and “wonderful.”
“[Biden] was crying,” Gibbons told the BBC. “It really affected him and then we said a prayer, said a decade of the rosary for his family. He lit a candle and then he took a moment or two of [privacy] for prayer.”