The Vermont senator brings his populist message to Vatican City.
By GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI
VATICAN CITY — Bernie Sanders took his presidential campaign message to the Vatican on Friday afternoon, using a roughly fifteen-minute address at a conference here to decry wealth inequality, Wall Street, and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, while praising labor unions — the overriding themes of his political message on the trail.
“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,’” he said, speaking at the conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of an encyclical by Pope John Paul II to mark the end of the Cold War. “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: three and a half billion people.”
Sanders, who arrived in Rome shortly before the speech after an overnight flight from New York following Thursday night’s debate, spoke shortly after Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa. As he arrived in his motorcade, he was greeted by roughly two dozen expat Americans holding “Feel the Bern” and “Bernie 2016” signs, outside Perugino’s Gate.
According to someone in the closed room, the conference heard an apologetic message from Pope Francis, read aloud by someone there, confirming he wouldn’t be able to make it to the conference. Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pontiff’s chief spokesman, had confirmed on Thursday that there would be no meeting between the Pope and Sanders.
“We can say that with unregulated globalization, a world market economy built on speculative finance bust 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,’” said the candidate, who left the campaign stump for the 40-hour trip just before the critical New York primary, and who frequently invokes Pope Francis in his political speeches.
“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.”
The speech ranged from Sanders’ thoughts on teachings of Popes as long as 120 years ago, to the Panama Papers, as he addressed the largely academic audience while quoting from the 1991 Centesimus Annus encyclical he was here to celebrate.
At times it sounded remarkably like his campaign speech — “Top bankers on Wall Street have shown no shame for their bad behavior and have made no apologies to the public, he said” — and at times it was more like a sprawling endorsement of Pope Francis.
“There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Church’s moral teachings on the market economy,” he said, also invoking Laudato Si’, the pontiff’s 2015 encyclical on the environment.
“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.”
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