Two men in their 70s have been addressing massive crowds and sparking the imagination and passions of American progressives. Both have been featured on the cover of Time magazine.

On a first look, however, they couldn’t be more different. One is a Jewish American self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” politician from Vermont; the other, a Catholic religious leader from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bernie Sanders and Pope Francis, however, share a moral vision of the limitations and real-life repercussions of our current political-economic system as well as a sincere desire to change it.

This surprising intersection of political-economic ideas rooted in morality also reminds us that many people of the sixties generation not only have a history in common, but have become highly successful and moved into positions of considerable influence. Moreover, the huge response in America, to the Sanders campaign in particular, tells us something important not only about the state of this country, but also about what people with conviction can accomplish, despite their age. The moral courage in the face of systemic challenges demonstrated by both leaders recalls the sixties generation they are both a product of; Sanders as a civil rights activist amidst intense social turmoil and the pope as a young religious leader during a time of military dictatorship and right-wing death squads.

The pope has condemned the arrangements of our current political-economic system. Early on in his papacy, he set the tone:

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

Recently he has struck an even more radical tone. “An unfettered pursuit of money rules,” he told grassroots organizers in Bolivia. “That is the dung of the devil.”

Sanders, while not often calling out capitalism by name, similarly challenges the injustices and inequities it generates and explicitly calls himself a socialist. Long before his Sept. 14 speech at Liberty University, Sanders articulated his critique of our unequal economic system in moral terms. “I think this goes back to the Bible,” he told Mother Jones shortly before launching his presidential campaign. “There is something immoral when so few have so much and so many have so little.” At his Liberty University address, Sanders declared:

It would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love — it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today … when we talk about morality, and when we talk about justice, we have to, in my view, understand that there is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

These remarkable indictments of the system resonate because more and more people are coming to terms with the inability of small gestures of reform to address a host of deteriorating or stagnating economic, social and environmental trends: rising inequality, high levels of poverty, continued discrimination against women and people of color, staggering levels of incarceration, increasing corruption of the political system and looming ecological catastrophe, to name a few. The system is broken, and what is needed is systemic change — not simply changes in policy but a radical rethinking of the structure of the economy and society.