Pope discusses moral economy with Sanders before Greece trip
Candidate at Vatican says rich-poor gap worse than 100 years ago
Pope Francis met US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the Vatican on Saturday morning and the two discussed the need for morality in the world economy before the pontiff left for a visit to the Greek island of Lesbos.
Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs told Reuters that the meeting took place in the Vatican guest house where the pope lives and where Sanders had spent the night after addressing a Vatican conference on social justice.
The Vatican had said that a meeting between the two was not planned, and Sanders said he did not expect to meet the pope during his trip.
“He is a beautiful man,” Sanders said in an interview with ABC News after the meeting. “I am not a Catholic, but there is a radiance that comes from him.”
Sachs said Sanders, who was accompanied by his wife, former Burlington College president Jane O’Meara Sanders, spoke with the pope for about five minutes. Sachs, his wife, and Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, were also in the room.
“I just conveyed to him my admiration for the extraordinary work he is doing raising some of the most important issues facing our planet and the billions of people on the planet and injecting the need for morality in the global economy,” Sanders told ABC.
The Democratic hopeful from Vermont has campaigned on a promise to rein in corporate power and level the economic playing field for working and lower-income Americans whom he says have been left behind, a message echoing that of the pope.
When Sachs, who has advised the United Nations on climate change, was asked if the meeting could be interpreted as political, he said: “This was absolutely not political. This is a senator who for decades has been speaking about the moral economy.”
Sanders, the Brooklyn-born son of Polish Jewish immigrants, has said the trip was not a pitch for the Catholic vote but a testament to his admiration for the pontiff.
Sanders, addressing a Vatican conference on social justice on Friday, decried the “immoral” gap between the world’s rich and poor that he said was worse than a century ago.
He said in his speech to the Pontifical Academy of Social Science that the Roman Catholic Church’s first encyclical on social justice, written in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, lamented the enormous gap between the rich and the poor.
“That situation is worse today. In the year 2016, the top 1 percent of the people on this planet own more wealth than the bottom 99%,” the self-described democratic socialist said.
“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,” he said.
After reading the speech in the academy building inside the Vatican grounds, Sanders walked outside one of the city-state’s gates to talk to reporters and was greeted by chants of “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie” from a vocal group of local supporters.
Francis sent a message to the academy, saying he had wanted to meet the conference participants in the evening, but could not because he was leaving Rome early on Saturday to visit refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Saying he was “proud and excited to be here,” Sanders praised the pope’s views about creating “a moral economy, an economy that works for all people and not just for the people on top.”
Reflecting the themes of his campaign, he said he and the pope both agreed that “we’ve got to ingrain moral principles into our economy and there is no area where that is clearer than the area of climate change. The greed of the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying our planet.”
Francis wrote a major encyclical, or papal treatise, last year on the need to respect the environment.
In other parts of his speech, Sanders decried “reckless financial deregulation,” including rules on political party financing, that he said had “established a system in which billionaires can buy elections” in exchange for laws that would make them only richer.
“Rather than an economy aimed at the common good, we have been left with an economy operated for the top 1%, who get richer and richer as the working class, the young and the poor fall further and further behind,” he said. (Reuters)