Why Is Bernie Sanders Going to the Vatican?

Rather than campaigning in New York in the final days before the state’s critical primary, Bernie Sanders jetted off to Rome Thursday night to attend an academic conference at the Vatican. The conference, weirdly enough, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of an economic encyclical penned by the anti-Communist Pope John Paul II to address economic reforms in Europe’s newly former Soviet bloc countries.

What’s a nice social democrat doing in a place like that? Chalk it up to political naiveté fueled by the mania surrounding the current pope.

Since Vatican officials announced the plan last week, the move has been embroiled in the sort of controversy that percolates only out of the byzantine world of Vatican politics, replete with a gendered contretemps over how, exactly, Sanders got invited to attend a conference at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in the first place.

But the palace intrigue, not uncommon in matters of Vatican invitations (e.g., the Kim Davis affair), has obscured what really deserves attention with regard to the Sanders visit: just how politically tone deaf and pointless it is. Although Sanders’ reason for attending appears to hinge on the current pope’s celebrity, Francis will not be in attendance, and Vatican officials say Sanders will have no meeting with him. It looks, then, like Sanders is putting on a likely expensive and time-consuming show for little gain.

Is he trying to make political hay out of religious pandering? Is he crossing a constitutional line by seeming to endorse a particular religion or religious view? Sanders has admitted to being inspired by the pope and that he longed for a papal photo op — more evidence his intentions are more fan boy than presidential.

Sanders has mostly gotten a pass on this front because his affection for Francis seems linked to their simpatico economic views, rather than an effort to sway the Catholic vote in the Democratic primary. He seems to be taking advantage of how Francis is seen as a global moral figure, dispensing proclamations about economic inequality that, although steeped in Catholic social teaching that has been around far longer than the contraception ban, has suddenly warmed the ecumenical cockles of a social democrat’s heart.

Sanders has latched on to Francis’ statements on the evils of economic inequality with the swooning, anti-wonky awe that has marked the pope’s remarkable global popularity, even among non-Catholics. On the section of his campaign website addressing inequality issues, Sanders quotes Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which, when it was released in 2013, drew attention as an economic manifesto rather than, as it was intended, a call to renewal for the world’s Catholics.

Evangelii Gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel, was cheered by the American Catholic left as revitalizing Catholic economic justice teaching at a time when the church’s U.S. hierarchy has been in the grip of American culture wars. But out of 288 numbered paragraphs in the document, only about a dozen directly address economic issues, particularly inequality, the evils of consumerism and what Francis calls a “‘throw away’ culture.”