President Biden was moved to tears on Friday during a stop at a Catholic shrine in Ireland when he discovered that a chaplain working there had performed last rites on his late son Beau Biden. "It was incredible to see him," Biden said later during remarks at the foot of a cathedral in Ballina, which is near Knock, the AP reports. "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 the Rev. Richard Gibbons.
Gibbons said he discovered earlier in the day that the Rev. 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 the president's son. O'Grady is a former US Army chaplain and was formerly assigned to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where Beau Biden died in 2015 of brain cancer at age 46. But Gibbons said he did not know about the connection until Friday. "I told the president that," Gibbons told BBC Ulster. "He wanted to meet him straightaway, so he dispatched a Secret Service agent to go and find him."
"He was crying, and it really affected him," Gibbons said of Biden. "Then we said a prayer, we said a decade of the rosary for his family, we lit a candle." O'Grady told Irish national broadcaster RTE that Biden "gave me a big hug, it was like a reunion. He told me he appreciated everything that was done." Biden misses his son, O'Grady said. "He has been grieving a lot, but I think the grief is kind of going down a bit. We talked a little bit about how grief can take several years." During a speech to the Irish parliament this week, Biden said it was his son who should have been standing there as president.
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