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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) holds a really outside his childhood home in Flatbush on April 8, 2016 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Eric Thayer/Getty Images/AFP)

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) holds a rally outside his childhood home in Flatbush on April 8, 2016 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Eric Thayer/Getty Images/AFP)

US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is off to see the wizard, so to speak. According to a report in the Washington Post, Sanders has accepted an invitation to Rome to attend, “a celebration and study session marking the 25th anniversary of Centesimus Annus, a key document on economic and political inequities issued by Pope John Paul II in 1991.”

Speaking of Jorge Bergoglio (AKA Francis I), Sanders commented, “I must tell you that I am a very great fan of the role that Pope Francis has been playing in talking about inequality in this world. He has been out there talking about the need for a moral economy…an economy in which we have a moral responsibility to pay attention to what he calls ‘the dispossessed.’ ”

There have been various reports as to how Sanders managed to secure an invitation to the Vatican study session, with at least one Vatican official intimating that Sanders invited himself. Margaret Archer, president of the pontifical academy in Rome, the group sponsoring the study session, was quoted saying, “Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons.” “He may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly,” and that, “his presence threatens to make the event political.”

Michael Briggs, another Vatican official, disputed Archer’s claims, saying, “The invitation came to the senator from the Vatican.” As the Washington Post reports, “the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the senior Vatican spokesman, said that the invitation to Sanders did not come from the pope…Rather, the invitation came via the hand of an influential Argentine cleric in Vatican City, Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who heads the ancient Pontifical Academy of Sciences.”

The statements of Brigg’s and Lombardi are more in accord with the practice of Rome that that of Archer. After all, it stretches the imagination beyond the breaking point to suppose that a prominent politician is going to show up at a high level Vatican meeting on his own. Rome doesn’t work that way. And as to the complaint that Sanders’ presence will bring an unwanted political cast to the proceedings, just spare me already. Rome has been knee deep in political machinations for over a millennium . Are we really to believe that a senators’ presence at one of its meetings is some novel or unplanned development?

My take on the dispute is that there may be a bit of a turf war going on in the Vatican, but that the powers that be ultimately want the Vermont socialist there for the conference. That the invitation was not made by the pope but by one of his lieutenants seems to be simply Rome’s way of endorsing Sanders but putting some distance between him and the pope, allowing Francis to appear not to be taking sides in the US presidential election.

Of course, the current occupant of the seat of Antichrist already has involved himself deeply in the election. In the fall of 2015 he lectured Congress on climate change and immigration, two key issues in the current election cycle, and all but called out Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump by name during his February visit to Mexico for Trump’s proposal to build a wall between the two countries.

A further reason to believe the Vatican wants Sanders there is that the subject of the meeting, Centesimus Annus, is a perfect fit for Sanders’ socialist politics. For Centesimus Annus is a socialist papal encyclical written by a previous Antichrist, John Paul II, in commemoration of Rerum Novarum, the granddaddy of all socialist papal encyclicals, penned in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII.

For Evangelicals interested in reading a sound analysis of Centesimus Annus written by a Christian, I highly recommend John Robbins 1999 book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, in which the author spends an entire chapter showing that John Paul II’s encyclical, far from being a defense of capitalism as some confused Romanists have argued, is a paean to the socialism favored by the bishops of Rome and anti-capitalist, big- government politicians alike.

According to Robbins, Centesimus Annus is a “quasi-Marxist analysis of capitalism,” in which the pope endorsed several pet falsehoods of Roman Catholic social teaching, including the universal destination of goods (i.e., the notion that private property is not absolute, that someone who “needs” your property has the right to take it, either by himself of through the agency of the state) and liberation theology (i.e. violent, Marxist-style revolution). Further, Robbins tells us, the document, “repeatedly condemned real (“early,” “unbridled,” and “primitive”) capitalism and repeatedly reaffirmed the Roman Church-State’s commitment to her fundamental social principles of the universal destination of goods, the primacy of need [in determining who has the right of possession], and government regulation and control of the economy.”

Although they have their differences, it would seem that both Bernie and Bergoglio share both a common hatred of freedom, limited government and capitalism, as well as a common love of authoritarian big government and socialism. Bergoglio and Bernie both talk the talk of compassion and care for the poor, but their socialist policies, in enacted, would ensure that the plight of the poorest would become more desperate that it already is. Capitalism and freedom are not the cause of poverty or even the extreme wealth disparity that has become commonplace in the West, they are the cure for them. Big government, socialism, regulation and criminal crony corporate bailouts are the real culprits, but you’ll never hear that from the Vatican or from Sanders . And if Sanders and the pope have their way, we can expect more the same destructive policies that have created the current mess. May the God save the United States from their evil plans.