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Bernie Sanders fails to meet pope on Vatican visit

Democrat presidential candidate makes speech calling for redistribution of world’s wealth

Bernie Sanders arriving at the Vatican for a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of ‘Centesimus Annus’, a high-level teaching document by Pope John Paul II on the economy and social justice at the end of the Cold War. Photograph: Angelo Carconi/EPA
Bernie Sanders arriving at the Vatican for a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of ‘Centesimus Annus’, a high-level teaching document by Pope John Paul II on the economy and social justice at the end of the Cold War. Photograph: Angelo Carconi/EPA
Paddy Agnew in Rome
Sat Apr 16 2016 - 01:00

On Friday afternoon when the time came for US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to address the Holy See's Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, there was no sign of the senator.

Airport delays on his lightning visit to the Vatican made Mr Sanders 20 minutes late, but they did not undermine a forceful address whose main theme clearly would have pleased Pope Francis, namely that the time has come to redistribute the world's wealth.

Friday's conference was a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical, Centesimus Annus, which had offered "prescient" criticism of "post-Berlin Wall" capitalism. Drawing a line from that document to the great 19th century encyclical, Rerum Novarum by Leo XIII, Mr Sanders said there were "few places in modern thought" to rival the "insight of the church's moral teachings on the market economy".

Sitting beside an approving Evo Morales, the activist president of Bolivia, Mr Sanders said "the issue of wealth and income inequality" was the great "economic", "political" and "moral" issue of our time, pointing out that we live in a world where the top 1 per cent "own more wealth than the bottom 99 per cent". He pointed a finger at "unregulated globalisation".

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“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 . . . globalisation was used as a pretext to deregulate the banks.”

‘American economy’

“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.”

As for the “hot” issue on Mr Sanders’s brief visit, namely would he meet the pope, the answer was a definite “No” – as the Holy See had warned.

Pope Francis did send a message to academy chancellor, Argentine bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, saying he had intended to "drop by" but the pressure of his preparations for today's sensitive trip to the Greek island of Lesbos had made that impossible.