Bernie met with the Pope

Sanders invited himself.

Sanders won't speak.

Sanders will speak, but won't meet with the Pope. 

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/16/politics/bernie-sanders-pope-francis-vatican-visit/index.html

well I guess I was wrong about the whole trip. Mea culpa.

They talked about it and said it's ok and said for penance you have to say three hail Marys and eat Librarylady's matzoh charlotte.

dave said:

Sanders invited himself.

Sanders won't speak.

Sanders will speak, but won't meet with the Pope. 


http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/16/politics/bernie-sanders-pope-francis-vatican-visit/index.html

+100

Way to go Bernie!

I am beginning to fancy Bernie myself!! But that might be due to the fact that I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. 

mtierney said:

I am beginning to fancy Bernie myself!! But that might be due to the fact that I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. 

How about the fact that he espouses Christian values such as helping the least among us? See if you can find his speech at Liberty University, a Christian evangelist university.

Tom_Reingold said:

mtierney said:

I am beginning to fancy Bernie myself!! But that might be due to the fact that I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. 

How about the fact that he espouses Christian values such as helping the least among us? See if you can find his speech at Liberty University, a Christian evangelist university.

It's great the @mtierney is thinking of voting for Bernie. Welcome to the fold!!

This is the speech he gave (or at least the prepared notes for it).

https://berniesanders.com/urgency-moral-economy-reflections-anniversary-centesimus-annus/

The best way to help Bernie over the next 3 days:

https://go.berniesanders.com/page/content/phonebank/

Please do what you're schedule permits.

mtierney said:

I am beginning to fancy Bernie myself!! But that might be due to the fact that I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. 

There is hope for you yet.  

This meeting and $2.75 will get you a ride on the NYC subway if you hurry to beat the next fare increase.  Bernie Sanders is so ignorant about many of his favorite issues, such as  international trade, breaking up the banks and income distribution as to border on criminality.  It is interesting to note how little he donated to charity in 2014 from an income that put him in the top 2%.  The only thing worse than electing him would be to elect Hillary the Liar, Trump the buffoon or Cruz the nitwit.  Let's face it folks this is the worse slate of potential candidates since 1964.

mtierney said:

I am beginning to fancy Bernie myself!! But that might be due to the fact that I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. 

Well I hope my birth place doesn't influence me. I was born in Queens, not far from he who shall not be named!

thechamp said:

This meeting and $2.75 will get you a ride on the NYC subway if you hurry to beat the next fare increase.  Bernie Sanders is so ignorant about many of his favorite issues, such as  international trade, breaking up the banks and income distribution as to border on criminality.  It is interesting to note how little he donated to charity in 2014 from an income that put him in the top 2%.  The only thing worse than electing him would be to elect Hillary the Liar, Trump the buffoon or Cruz the nitwit.  Let's face it folks this is the worse slate of potential candidates since 1964.

what an excellent contribution! full of insight and wisdom, it is.

Here's the full story on Bernie's meeting with the Pope.  It was planned:

http://nyti.ms/1NeASBh

I hung out one night with the keyboard player from Soft Cell.

This is from a Reuters Account in the Popes own words:

"This morning when I left, Sen. Sanders was there. ... He knew I was leaving at that time and I had the kindness to greet him and his wife and another couple who were with them," the pope told reporters traveling back with him to the Vatican.
  

"When I came down, I greeted them, shook their hands and nothing more. This is good manners. It's called good manners and not getting mixed up in politics. If anyone thinks that greeting someone means getting involved in politics, they should see a psychiatrist," the pope said.

Doesn't sound like the Sanders account.

The Pope, unlike Bernie, is in a position of influence without the burden of implementing policies to effect change in a nation of tens of millions.  Bernie, however, if elected, will have to do just that.  And that is where his administration would be a complete failure.

mod said:

This is from a Reuters Account in the Popes own words:

"This morning when I left, Sen. Sanders was there. ... He knew I was leaving at that time and I had the kindness to greet him and his wife and another couple who were with them," the pope told reporters traveling back with him to the Vatican.
  

"When I came down, I greeted them, shook their hands and nothing more. This is good manners. It's called good manners and not getting mixed up in politics. If anyone thinks that greeting someone means getting involved in politics, they should see a psychiatrist," the pope said.




Doesn't sound like the Sanders account.

Bernie said they met for a few minutes. I don't see any discrepancy. (Are you saying he's not being truthful? Can't that be seen as vilification?)

I'm Facebook friends with the guy who invented Tribbles.

ridski said:

I'm Facebook friends with the guy who invented Tribbles.

You're absolutely hysterically funny.

Tay Zonday follows my Twitter feed.

Hope Bernie mentioned to the Pope that there will be no economic justice for women without reproductive rights and equal pay for women.

I bet he forgot.

mod said:

This is from a Reuters Account in the Popes own words:

"This morning when I left, Sen. Sanders was there. ... He knew I was leaving at that time and I had the kindness to greet him and his wife and another couple who were with them," the pope told reporters traveling back with him to the Vatican.
  

"When I came down, I greeted them, shook their hands and nothing more. This is good manners. It's called good manners and not getting mixed up in politics. If anyone thinks that greeting someone means getting involved in politics, they should see a psychiatrist," the pope said.




Doesn't sound like the Sanders account.

So they prop Sander's in front of the pope and the pope having good greets him as he would greet any other who gets placed before him.

Of course it has become political. Sanders his campaign made it so by ensuring everyone gets to know of Sanders meeting the pope.

tjohn said:

The Pope, unlike Bernie, is in a position of influence without the burden of implementing policies to effect change in a nation of tens of millions.  Bernie, however, if elected, will have to do just that.  And that is where his administration would be a complete failure.

+1

When I was a little tyke my sister went on holiday and I was told she was going to being me back a real magical gnome. I was so disappointed when it turned out to be a hand held plaster. 

mod said:

This is from a Reuters Account in the Popes own words:

"This morning when I left, Sen. Sanders was there. ... He knew I was leaving at that time and I had the kindness to greet him and his wife and another couple who were with them," the pope told reporters traveling back with him to the Vatican.
  

"When I came down, I greeted them, shook their hands and nothing more. This is good manners. It's called good manners and not getting mixed up in politics. If anyone thinks that greeting someone means getting involved in politics, they should see a psychiatrist," the pope said.

Doesn't sound like the Sanders account.

Here's what happened. It was more than a meeting with the Pope (see bold):

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-pope-francis-vatican.html

Bernie Sanders Meets With Pope Francis

By JASON HOROWITZ and YAMICHE ALCINDORAPRIL 16, 2016

VATICAN CITY — For a while, Senator Bernie Sanders’s Roman holiday seemed less than it was cracked up to be.

Immediately after his campaign announced that he would leave the United States for a “high-level meeting” at the Vatican, questions arose about the wisdom of the trip. The critical New York primary was just days away. One official of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which hosted the conference Mr. Sanders would attend, even suggested he had fished for the invitation.

Most critically, there seemed to be little chance that Mr. Sanders would meet the Vatican resident whose name he frequently invokes. Pope Francis, it  turned out, would not be visiting the conference of the academy, an in-house think tank of the Vatican. Politically, a trip to Rome without a meeting with Francis would have been a blunder, Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Fordham University who is teaching at Yale, had said on Friday. “The point is to make sure you are going to get an audience with the pope,” he said. “Anything short of an actual visit will probably be a mistake.”

Mr. Sanders continued to hold out hope. “I certainly would be delighted and proud if I had the opportunity to meet with him,” he said before leaving New York.

He also had two things going for him: his host, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine who is the chancellor of the academy and happens to be close to Francis, and his hotel room, also close to the pope. Mr. Sanders was to stay in a second-floor room at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where Francis keeps his residence.

“So it won’t be difficult to find the pope,” the bishop said last week, seeming to hint at something.

On Thursday, the day before the conference, a Vatican spokesman appeared to end all speculation, saying, “There won’t be a meeting with the Holy Father.”

Bishop Sánchez Sorondo dismissed the statement as “Roman gossip.”

But final word, it seemed, came Friday afternoon in the form of a handwritten letter from the pope apologizing to conference attendees for his absence.

“I will keep them all in my prayers and good wishes, and send them my heartfelt thanks for their participation,” he wrote. “May the Lord bless you. Fraternally, Franciscus.”

Around 5:30 p.m. Friday, the conference’s business ended and Mr. Sanders made an appointment for dinner at the Casa Santa Marta with his foreign policy adviser, Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and a fellow conference participant.

Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, sat with Mr. Sachs and his wife, Sonia, for a soup and buffet dinner, where they were joined by Bishop Sánchez Sorondo and Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, the pope’s right-hand man and one of the Vatican’s top power players.

“It was a wide-ranging conversation,” Mr. Sachs said. “It was about issues of the church and its history, about Honduras and foreign policy.”

But the most important words occurred in the middle of dinner, when a personal secretary for Francis arrived with the news Mr. Sanders had been hoping for, Mr. Sachs said.

If Mr. Sanders were in the foyer of the Casa Santa Marta at 6 a.m. the next day, he would be able to speak briefly with Francis as the pope headed to the airport for his Saturday trip to Greece, where the pope would be addressing the migrant crisis.

So early Saturday morning, Mr. Sanders stood in the marble foyer, which looks out onto a large cobblestone drive just inside the Vatican walls. Joining him were his wife, Mr. Sachs and his wife and Bishop Sánchez Sorondo, the senator’s de facto Vatican fixer.

The pope, speaking to reporters on his plane later in the day, described the meeting. “This morning when I was leaving, Senator Sanders was there,” he said, adding, “He knew I was leaving at that time, and he had the courtesy to greet me.”

No photos of the encounter were permitted, but Mr. Sachs said the senator was delighted all the same. He was beaming as he left the guesthouse, and celebrated the informal audience with a victory lap of sorts in St. Peter’s Basilica along with Mr. Sachs and the bishop, passing Bernini’s Baldacchino, a monumental bronze canopy over the papal altar, and Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Aware that his every statement is parsed for deeper meaning, Francis said he was simply being polite, not political.

“I shook his hand and nothing more,” he said. “If someone thinks that greeting someone means getting involved in politics,” he added, laughing, “I recommend that he find a psychiatrist!”

But the candidate was excited to talk about his coveted souvenir.

“I conveyed to him my great admiration for the extraordinary work that he is doing all over the world in demanding that morality be part of our economy,” Mr. Sanders told reporters aboard the plane as it rushed him back to the campaign in New York.

The Pope went out of his way to personally greet Bernie at 6AM, but had to be politically careful not to appear to be interfering with the election.  It's obvious that as far as economic policies go, Francis and Bernie are more soulmates than anyone else running for President here, so it was appropriate that they met and exchanged greetings.  It highlighted the solidarity of their similar economic beliefs a bit, in the narrow way that it was politically possible to do so.

tjohn said:

The Pope, unlike Bernie, is in a position of influence without the burden of implementing policies to effect change in a nation of tens of millions.  Bernie, however, if elected, will have to do just that.  And that is where his administration would be a complete failure.

Domestically, worst-case scenario, we end up with the status quo.  Essentially what Hillary is proposing.

Internationally, worst-case scenario, we end up with the status quo.  Better than the new wars that Hillary would get us into.

But just as Bernie has changed the narrative in the Democratic primary, as President he'll change the narrative for our nation, setting an agenda for real change in education, health care, jobs and the environment.

That's after the general election, for which all evidence shows that he stands a much better change to win than Hillary.

mjh said:

Hope Bernie mentioned to the Pope that there will be no economic justice for women without reproductive rights and equal pay for women.

I bet he forgot.

The Pope has embraced equal pay for women: http://time.com/3840049/pope-francis-equal-pay/

And he has made some movement toward reproductive rights, although clearly he has a long way to go:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/health/zika-pope-francis-contraceptives/

And I'm sure that he is aware of Bernie's 100% support for a woman's right to choose.

paulsurovell said:

mjh said:

Hope Bernie mentioned to the Pope that there will be no economic justice for women without reproductive rights and equal pay for women.

I bet he forgot.

The Pope has embraced equal pay for women: http://time.com/3840049/pope-francis-equal-pay/

And he has made some movement toward reproductive rights, although clearly he has a long way to go:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/health/zika-pope-francis-contraceptives/

And I'm sure that he is aware of Bernie's 100% support for a woman's right to choose.

I'm sorry, but you cannot gloss over the facts.  

Women are second-class citizens without rights in the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church is doing all it can -- politically and legally here in the U.S. and elsewhere -to keep things that way.