Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will speak at a Vatican event April 15, but there’s some dispute over whether he was invited or pushed to attend.
“The president of the academy organizing this event has not been contacted with monumental discourtesy,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, told Bloomberg News.
“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Archer added on the issue of who pushed for Sanders to attend.
Vatican officials and the Sanders campaign both later denied this.
Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs told the Washington Examiner that “the report is false.” Asked why anyone would say Sanders essentially invited himself, Briggs replied, “I have no idea.”
Vatican senior official Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Soronodo also denied Archer’s claims, telling Reuters “It was not that way.”
“This is not true and she knows it,” Soronodo added. “I invited him with her consensus.”
Briggs also disputed that the visit was time to win over Catholic voters ahead of the New York primary, saying “there is no connection [between the primary and the conference], it just so happens that it is on this date.”
On Friday morning, the Vermont senator’s campaign announced that Sanders would be visiting the Vatican at the Pope’s invitation to take part in a conference on social, environmental and economic issues. The conference takes place just four days before the New York primary, a state with many catholic residents.
During a Friday morning MSNBC interview Sanders said that he was a “big, big fan of the Pope” and admired his work on social justice.
