Vatican official criticizes Bernie Sanders' 'monumental discourtesy' after he highlights supposed invitation from Pope Francis
US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders announced on Friday he had accepted an invitation to the Vatican, saying his views on fighting income inequality were similar to those of Pope Francis.
"I am a big, big fan of the pope," Sanders said in an interview on MSNBC. "He's trying to inject this sense of morality into how we do economics ... and we need that absolutely desperately."
The Vatican, however, seems to think a little differently about the manner in which the invitation was organized.
A senior Vatican official said that Sanders showed "monumental discourtesy," and reached out to obtain the invitation himself, according to Bloomberg.
"Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons," Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences which is hosting the conference Sanders is set to speak at, told Bloomberg over the phone. "I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly - not that he will."
The Sanders campaign said in a statement that he would attend a conference on social, economic and environmental issues during the April 15 visit. Sanders, who has made fighting poverty a central issue of his campaign, said he would talk about how to create a moral economy during his visit.
The visit will come four days before the primary election in delegate-rich New York, a state that both Sanders and his rival Democrat Hillary Clinton are viewing as home turf and hoping to win.
The announcement of Sanders' trip came as the pope called for a church that was less strict and more compassionate toward "imperfect" Catholics.
Sanders said he admires the pope for talking about the "worship of money, the greed that's out there."
"There are people who think that Bernie Sanders is radical," Sanders said on MSNBC. "Read what the pope is writing."
(Reuters reporting by Doina Chiacu and Megan Cassella; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Bill Trott)