Joe Biden broke down in tears when he met the priest who performed the last rites on his late son Beau.
The President of the United States was at Knock Shrine in Co Mayo ahead of his historic speech in Ballina when the chance encounter occurred. Fr Frank O'Grady, who is now the chaplain at Knock shrine, spent 12 years with the US military at Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington DC. He was assigned to the Medical Intensive Care Unit where Beau Biden was for six weeks until he died of brain cancer in 2015.
Fr O'Grady told RTE: "I was very surprised when I got a phone call to say the president wanted to see me. It was a delightful ten minutes with him. I hadn’t seen him really in eight years since Beau died. His son Hunter was there too, so we had a real reunion."
Read more: Joe Biden recap: US President visits ancestral home in Mayo
He also said: "He certainly misses his son. 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... It really hit home very hard to him about his son's passing when he comes to Knock, because we talk about mysteries of life and death in a place like Knock all the time here."
Fr Richard Gibbons, the parish priest of Knock, told the BBC he had not known about the connection between Biden and Fr O'Grady until the president spoke of his son’s death after arriving – about the encounter: "He laughed, he cried, it just kind of hit the man, you could just see how deeply it all felt and meant to him. It was an extraordinary afternoon. I won't forget it, I can tell you that it was quite something else."
Knock shrine was the first stop for Biden during his visit to Mayo yesterday. While visiting the shrine, he touched the apparition wall and continued by following a tour of the basilica.
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