Hillary will have a talk with Cecile Richards.
Imagine emerging from a rocky political week only to announce, as Bernie Sanders did, that, oh, by the way, the Vatican called. Actually, it was the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, but close enough, I suppose.
Hillary Clinton thought bubble: He’s Jewish, for crying out loud. What am I, chopped liver? No, I’m Methodist! But if I can become a New Yorker, I can become a Catholic.
Some people have all the kismet. Or, sometimes people just happen to agree that communism isn’t really so bad. OK, I’m exaggerating, but only a smidgeon.
Sanders is merely a democratic socialist, which sounds almost nice but means more or less equal misery. The pope is something else entirely. A pastoral leader who washes the feet of the homeless and eschews the elaborate trappings of the corner office, he’s the real deal, as in living as Christ did. He’s also a great, big troublemaker.
“People think Bernie Sanders is radical,” Bernie Sanders said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Uh-uh. Read what the pope is writing these days.”
Indeed, Francis is a radical, just as Jesus was in his time.
What’s radical about this pope is that he, like both Sanders and Jesus, says fresh, untraditional things that sound an awful lot like liberal ideas. But he’s speaking and writing as the pope, not as a president of the United States. His ideas are aspirational both in scope and in application. He calls us to love one another, as he should, but love doesn’t usually enter into the equations of a government-run economy. It can get rather messy at times — and mean.
The pope really believes that it’s better to give than to receive, which is why so many love him. Sanders thinks more or less the same way. The difference is that one wants to raise consciousness about our obligation to the less fortunate; the other wants to restructure America’s economic institutions to ensure that money trickles down — mandatorily rather than charitably.