In an interview that aired yesterday, Fr Thomas Rosica, CEO of Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation, questioned Senator Sanders on a range of issues, including poverty, abortion and the papal encyclical Laudato si’.
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Sanders added that he agrees with the pontiff’s view that humanity should be about more than running after riches and that wealth should be put in the service of the people to counter inequality.
He pointed in particular to the way Jesus called out the “scribes and Pharisees” as seemingly devout believers who in effect tell the crowds to do as they say, not as they do: “The Lord teaches us the way of doing: and how many times we find people – ourselves included – so often in the church, who say, ‘Oh, we are very Catholic.’ But what do you do?” He is not an exponent of “trickle-down economic theory”, he said.
“If I repeated some passages from the homilies of the Church Fathers in the second or third century, about how we must treat the poor, some would accuse me of giving a Marxist homily”, he said in an October 2014 interview.
Fr Rosica also asked Sanders about his support for abortion rights. But could that trend be broken with Pope Francis?
She claimed that her statement wasn’t in response to what Pope Francis said about Donald Trump, but her the controversial statement did come as a direct response to the Pope’s statement in which he said building walls “isn’t Christian”.
Sanders mentioned that a few “liberal friends” of his has expressed ambivalence regarding Francis due to the view of the church on abortion. “I am certain I have never said anything more than what is in the social doctrine of the church”, he told reporters last September.
Sanders’s own candidacy has reignited a previous debate over whether Catholics can support a socialist, a debate over socialism and Catholic moral teaching that has persisted since the late 1900s, said Heath Carter, a history professor at Valparaiso University.
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“By Sanders’s definition, Pope Francis has critiqued worship of money, ” Carter said. “The pope rejects the excessive individualism of left and right, challenging those who make the free market or personal choice the measure everything”. “And I think what I learned, as a child, not up here, but here, before I understood politics, is what many African Americans in this country understand, is that politics has a huge impact on your lives”. Later, the Vatican stated that the Pope’s comments were not meant as a “personal” attack on anyone, while Trump said that, having read the full transcript of the Pope’s remarks, he found them “softer” than initial news reports. “But if they want me to recite the creed, I can!”
