BERNIE & JANE SANDERS met with Pope Francis after Bernie's speech at the Vatican conference he was invited to and then spent the night at the Pope's residence. The Pope didn't endorse Bernie for president as he shouldn't, but they do have more in common than Pope Francis does with any of the Christian presidential candidates. This from the +Washington Post and +Sojourners .......
Sanders meets with Pope Francis, calls it a ‘real honor’
US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, backdropped by St. Peter’s Basilica, leaves after an interview with the Associated Press, at the Vatican Saturday, April 16, 2016. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says in an interview with The Associated Press that he met with Pope Francis. Sanders says the meeting took place Saturday morning before the pope left for his one-day visit to Greece. He says he was honored by the meeting, and that he told the pope he appreciated the message that he is sending the world about the need to inject morality and justice into the world economy. (Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press)
ROME — U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told The Associated Press that he met briefly with Pope Francis at the papal residence Saturday and said it was a “real honor” to call on “one of the extraordinary figures” in the world.
Sanders, in Rome for a Vatican conference on economic inequality and climate change, said the meeting took place before the pope left for Greece, where Francis was highlighting the plight of refugees.
The Vermont senator, in a race with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, said he told the pope that he appreciated the message that Francis was sending the world about the need to inject morality and justice into the world economy. Sanders said that was a message he, too, has tried to convey.
“We had an opportunity to meet with him this morning,” Sanders said in an Associated Press interview. “It was a real honor for me, for my wife and I to spend some time with him. I think he is one of the extraordinary figures not only in the world today but in modern world history.”
Before returning to the United States and campaigning in New York, where voters get their say Tuesday in the next election contest, Sanders said he had the chance to tell the pope that “I was incredibly appreciative of the incredible role that he is playing in this planet in discussing issues about the need for an economy based on morality, not greed.”
Sanders and his wife, Jane, stayed overnight at the pope’s residence, the Domus Santa Marta hotel in the Vatican gardens, on the same floor as the pope. They were seen at the hotel reception, carrying their own bags.
Jeffrey Sachs, a Sanders foreign policy adviser, said there were no photographs taken of the meeting.
The Vatican is loath to get involved in electoral campaigns, and usually tries to avoid any perception of partisanship as far as the pope is concerned, although Francis in February rebuked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump over Trump’s stand on immigration. Popes rarely travel to countries during the thick of political campaigns, knowing a papal photo opportunity with the sitting head of state can be exploited for political ends.
But Francis has been known to flout Vatican protocol, and the meeting with Sanders was evidence that his personal desires often trump Vatican diplomacy.
“His message is resonating with every religion on earth with people who have no religion and it is a message that says we have got to inject morality and justice into the global economy,” Sanders said.
Sanders said the meeting should not be viewed as the pope injecting himself into the campaign.
“The issues that I talked about yesterday at the conference, as you well know, are issues that I have been talking about not just throughout this campaign but throughout my political life,” Sanders said in the interview. “And I am just very much appreciated the fact that the pope in many ways has been raising these issues in a global way in the sense that I have been trying to raise them in the United States.”
Sachs said the candidate and his wife met the pope in the foyer of the domus, and that the meeting lasted about five minutes. Sanders later joined his family, including some of his grandchildren, for a walking tour of St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the holiest Catholic shrines.
The trip gave Sanders a moment on the world stage, putting him alongside priests, bishops, academics and two South American presidents at the Vatican conference.
Sanders has been at a disadvantage during his campaign against Clinton, President Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, on issues of foreign policy. But Sanders was peppered with questions from academics and ecclesiastics during Friday’s conference in a manner that might have been afforded a head of state.
The invitation to Sanders to address the Vatican session raised eyebrows when it was announced and touched off allegations that the senator lobbied for the invitation.
But the chancellor for the pontifical academy, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, said he invited Sanders because he was the only U.S. presidential candidate who showed deep interest in the teachings of Francis.
Once back home, Sanders was set to refocus on the pivotal presidential contest in New York, a state with a significant number of Catholic voters. Clinton holds a lead among the delegates who will determine the Democratic nominee, and Sanders is trying to string together a series of victories in upcoming contests to draw closer.
ROME — U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders met privately with Pope Francis on Saturday, the capstone to an unusual detour from the American election.
Sanders said the meeting was for personal reasons and does not constitute an endorsement from the Holy See.
"I am an enormous fan of the pope because I think he has played a transformative role in the world in talking about issues that very rarely get the kind of discussion they deserve," Sanders said in an interview aboard his chartered plane. "Whether it is income and wealth inequality, whether it is what he calls the dispossessed, the young people, the old people, the unemployed people who are on the sidelines of society, whether it is the ideology of greed, whether it is need to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to save the planet, he has been a transformative leader.
"And he is a very beautiful man," Sanders continued. "When you meet him, you see something very, very special in his face. He is a man of peace, and you see that."
Some of Sanders's advisers, including his wife, Jane, also were at the meeting. He said that there was no discussion of his underdog candidacy or the election. There was no photograph of the brief meeting at the papal residence complex, in keeping with Vatican protocol and also, Sanders said, "to make clear that there is no endorsement here."
Francis, on Saturday, made it clear that his meeting with Sanders was not political, saying that those who thought it was should “look for a psychiatrist,”according to Reuters.
The pontiff met Sanders at the Vatican guest house, where the pope lives. “When I came down, I greeted him, I shook his hand and nothing more. This is called good manners and it is not getting involved in politics,” Reuters says the pope told reporters, during an answer to a question aboard the plane returning from the Greek island of Lesbos, where he visited a refugee camp.
“If anyone thinks that greeting someone is getting involved in politics, I recommend that he look for a psychiatrist,” he reportedly said while laughing.
Sanders was already at the Vatican, participating in a seminar on income inequality and economic justice at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, where he was invited to attend as well as speak. The trip suggests that Sanders is looking ahead to how he would continue and expand the focus on very liberal social justice issues that has defined his candidacy. In a matter of months he moved from gadfly to serious challenger to the longtime Democratic favorite, largely on the strength of a set of ideas more common to liberal university campuses than the political debate stage.
"If elected president I certainly would look forward to working with the pope in trying to create a moral economy, which was the theme of this conference; an economy which challenges the idea that greed has got to be the dominant force in the world's economy," Sanders said.
And if he loses?
"Well, the ideas and the efforts remain the same. I'm a United States senator from Vermont. And I'll continue to fight the fights that I've always fought," with a larger platform to do so, Sanders said.
www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/what-bernie-sanders-and-pope-francis-have-in-common/2016/04/13/5466088c-01b8-11e6-8bb1-f124a43f84dc_video.html
The Vatican invitation is symbolic of that platform, he agreed. But Sanders and the pontiff share many goals for social justice and economic restructuring, and Sanders suggested that, and not his candidacy, was the reason for the audience with Francis.
"The speech that I gave yesterday would have been the speech 10 years ago, long before I ever dreamed of running for president," he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Sanders said the trip was "absolutely" a worthwhile diversion from campaigning in New York, where he trails front-runner Hillary Clinton by double digits in most polls.
"Look, we have campaigned extraordinarily hard in New York," Sanders said. He claimed he has addressed 96,000 people across the state at rallies and other meetings. "We have worked very hard and when we go back, we're gonna work hard. This was an invitation that I would never have forgiven myself if I had refused."
Sanders needs a solid showing in New York, which offers more than 200 delegates, to maintain a plausible argument that he can catch up to Clinton. His path to the nomination has grown narrower even as he has defeated Clinton in a string of contests over the past month.
"Uh, we got a shot," Sanders said when asked about his prospects for Tuesday's primary vote. "It's gonna be tough for us, not just because Clinton has won two elections there, but because of the nature of the voting rules."
New York, which Clinton represented as a senator for eight years, allows only registered Democrats to vote in the Democratic primary, meaning independents are cut out. Sanders has been regularly defeating Clinton among independents. The state also does not allow same-day registration. Sanders said he disagrees with both rules.
"Those are the rules. They don't work for us," Sanders said. "But nonetheless, if there is a large voter turnout, we got a shot to win this."
Sanders flew to Rome on a large, chartered airliner, largely paid with campaign funds, spokesman Michael Briggs said.
He said he did not know the exact cost of the trip. News organizations flying with Sanders pay for their passage, and the Secret Service also pays a share.
Sanders has taken some criticism earlier in his campaign for using chartered aircraft — a luxury for the privileged class as well as an addition to carbon emissions — while railing against the excesses of the wealthiest top 1 percent of Americans.
Several of Sanders’s advisers, along with his wife, their four children and four of their grandchildren, accompanied him for the overnight visit to Rome. While Jane Sanders attended the conference with her husband and joined him in meeting the pope, the rest of the family spent time sightseeing. The trip also included a stay at a posh hotel.
Sanders was back on the plane Saturday, as he plans to campaign in Brooklyn in the evening.
Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report.
Read the Full Text of Bernie Sanders' Speech at the Vatican
Photo via R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock
Below is the prepared text of the address that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered on April 15 at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The conference is focused on “Centesimus Annus,” a landmark social justice encyclical by Saint John Paul II:
“The Urgency of a Moral Economy: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Centesimus Annus”
I am honored to be with you today and was pleased to receive your invitation to speak to this conference of The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Today we celebrate the encyclical Centesimus Annus and reflect on its meaning for our world a quarter-century after it was presented by Pope John Paul II. With the fall of Communism, Pope John Paul II gave a clarion call for human freedom in its truest sense: freedom that defends the dignity of every person and that is always oriented towards the common good.
The Church’s social teachings, stretching back to the first modern encyclical about the industrial economy, Rerum Novarum in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis’s inspiring encyclical Laudato Si’ this past year, have grappled with the challenges of the market economy. There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Church’s moral teachings on the market economy.
Over a century ago, Pope Leo XIII highlighted economic issues and challenges in Rerum Novarum that continue to haunt us today, such as what he called “the enormous wealth of a few as opposed to the poverty of the many.”
And let us be clear. That situation is worse today. In the year 2016, the top one percent of the people on this planet own more wealth than the bottom 99 percent, while the wealthiest 60 people — 60 people — own more than the bottom half — 3 1/2 billion people. At a time when so few have so much, and so many have so little, we must reject the foundations of this contemporary economy as immoral and unsustainable.
The words of Centesimus Annus likewise resonate with us today. One striking example:
Furthermore, society and the State must ensure wage levels adequate for the maintenance of the worker and his family, including a certain amount for savings. This requires a continuous effort to improve workers’ training and capability so that their work will be more skilled and productive, as well as careful controls and adequate legislative measures to block shameful forms of exploitation, especially to the disadvantage of the most vulnerable workers, of immigrants and of those on the margins of society. The role of trade unions in negotiating minimum salaries and working conditions is decisive in this area. (Para15)The essential wisdom of Centesimus Annus is this: A market economy is beneficial for productivity and economic freedom. But if we let the quest for profits dominate society; if workers become disposable cogs of the financial system; if vast inequalities of power and wealth lead to marginalization of the poor and the powerless; then the common good is squandered and the market economy fails us. Pope John Paul II puts it this way: profit that is the result of “illicit exploitation, speculation, or the breaking of solidarity among working people . . . has not justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man.” (Para43).
We are now twenty-five years after the fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. Yet we have to acknowledge that Pope John Paul’s warnings about the excesses of untrammeled finance were deeply prescient. Twenty-five years after Centesimus Annus, speculation, illicit financial flows, environmental destruction, and the weakening of the rights of workers is far more severe than it was a quarter century ago. Financial excesses, indeed widespread financial criminality on Wall Street, played a direct role in causing the world’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
We need a political analysis as well as a moral and anthropological analysis to understand what has happened since 1991. We can say that with unregulated globalization, a world market economy built on speculative finance burst through the legal, political, and moral constraints that had once served to protect the common good. In my country, home of the world’s largest financial markets, globalization was used as a pretext to deregulate the banks, ending decades of legal protections for working people and small businesses. Politicians joined hands with the leading bankers to allow the banks to become “too big to fail.” The result: eight years ago the American economy and much of the world was plunged into the worst economic decline since the 1930s. Working people lost their jobs, their homes and their savings, while the government bailed out the banks.
Inexplicably, the United States political system doubled down on this reckless financial deregulation, when the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of deeply misguided decisions, unleashed an unprecedented flow of money into American politics. These decisions culminated in the infamous Citizen United case, which opened the financial spigots for huge campaign donations by billionaires and large corporations to turn the U.S. political system to their narrow and greedy advantage. It has established a system in which billionaires can buy elections. Rather than an economy aimed at the common good, we have been left with an economy operated for the top 1 percent, who get richer and richer as the working class, the young and the poor fall further and further behind. And the billionaires and banks have reaped the returns of their campaign investments, in the form of special tax privileges, imbalanced trade agreements that favor investors over workers, and that even give multinational companies extra-judicial power over governments that are trying to regulate them.
But as both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis have warned us and the world, the consequences have been even direr than the disastrous effects of financial bubbles and falling living standards of working-class families. Our very soul as a nation has suffered as the public lost faith in political and social institutions. As Pope Francis has stated: “Man is not in charge today, money is in charge, money rules.” And the Pope has also stated: “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”
And further: “While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good.”
Pope Francis has called on the world to say: “No to a financial system that rules rather than serves” in Evangeli Gaudium. And he called upon financial executives and political leaders to pursue financial reform that is informed by ethical considerations. He stated plainly and powerfully that the role of wealth and resources in a moral economy must be that of servant, not master.
The widening gaps between the rich and poor, the desperation of the marginalized, the power of corporations over politics, is not a phenomenon of the United States alone. The excesses of the unregulated global economy have caused even more damage in the developing countries. They suffer not only from the boom-bust cycles on Wall Street, but from a world economy that puts profits over pollution, oil companies over climate safety, and arms trade over peace. And as an increasing share of new wealth and income goes to a small fraction of those at the top, fixing this gross inequality has become a central challenge. The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great economic issue of our time, the great political issue of our time, and the great moral issue of our time. It is an issue that we must confront in my nation and across the world.
Pope Francis has given the most powerful name to the predicament of modern society: the Globalization of Indifference. “Almost without being aware of it,” he noted, “we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.” We have seen on Wall Street that financial fraud became not only the norm but in many ways the new business model. Top bankers have shown no shame for their bad behavior and have made no apologies to the public. The billions and billions of dollars of fines they have paid for financial fraud are just another cost of doing business, another short cut to unjust profits.
Some might feel that it is hopeless to fight the economic juggernaut, that once the market economy escaped the boundaries of morality it would be impossible to bring the economy back under the dictates of morality and the common good. I am told time and time again by the rich and powerful, and the mainstream media that represent them, that we should be “practical,” that we should accept the status quo; that a truly moral economy is beyond our reach. Yet Pope Francis himself is surely the world’s greatest demonstration against such a surrender to despair and cynicism. He has opened the eyes of the world once again to the claims of mercy, justice, and the possibilities of a better world. He is inspiring the world to find a new global consensus for our common home.
I see that hope and sense of possibility every day among America’s young people. Our youth are no longer satisfied with corrupt and broken politics and an economy of stark inequality and injustice. They are not satisfied with the destruction of our environment by a fossil fuel industry whose greed has put short term profits ahead of climate change and the future of our planet. They want to live in harmony with nature, not destroy it. They are calling out for a return to fairness; for an economy that defends the common good by ensuring that every person, rich or poor, has access to quality health care, nutrition, and education.
As Pope Francis made powerfully clear last year in Laudato Si’, we have the technology and know-how to solve our problems — from poverty to climate change to health care to protection of biodiversity. We also have the vast wealth to do so, especially if the rich pay their way in fair taxes rather than hiding their funds in the world’s tax and secrecy havens — as the Panama Papers have shown.
The challenges facing our planet are not mainly technological or even financial, because as a world we are rich enough to increase our investments in skills, infrastructure, and technological know-how to meet our needs and to protect the planet. Our challenge is mostly a moral one, to redirect our efforts and vision to the common good. Centesimus Annus, which we celebrate and reflect on today, and Laudato Si’, are powerful, eloquent, and hopeful messages of this possibility. It is up to us to learn from them, and to move boldly toward the common good in our time.
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