I’m serious. Ten minutes is not long to speak on a complex subject, and Sanders wasted almost a quarter of his speech thanking his hosts, name-checking popes, and giving an extensive quote from Centesimus Annus that he frankly would have been better off summarizing. The rest of it is Sanders’ usual stump speech, barely adapted to rather obviously bait Pope Francis into giving his blessing. (The campaign hoped for a meeting between the senator and the pontiff, a prospect that was summarily dismissed by the Vatican.) Sanders rattles off more or less the same laundry list of complaints he’s used at every rally in the past year, with only the thinnest nods at setting his perspective in a deeper moral or intellectual context. Again, ten minutes does not allow very much room for a deep dive, which is exactly why the Sanders campaign should have taken the hint and decided there was a schedule conflict that prevented him from speaking after all.
The whole Bernie-goes-to-Rome thing has been a shambles, to be honest. The campaign got Sanders a back-door invite which surprised and irritated the academy president, not to mention stepping on the roll-out of Amoris Laetitia, the Pope’s new teaching on the family. Then they did it again, taking a private jet to Rome to speak on the idolatry of money in the middle of a make-it-or-break-it primary in New York, and arriving in Rome on a day when the Vatican would much rather be talking about Francis’ meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew in Lesbos about the European refugee crisis
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http://religiondispatches.org/bernies-roman-holiday/
I'm glad the truth got out.. I was concerned it wouldn't.. with all the BS flying around.
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