Senator Bernie Sanders claps with a song during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Dome event on January 21, 2019 in Columbia, South Carolina. (Sean Rayford/Getty)

Democratic Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has confirmed he will visit the Pope and lavished praise on him – just hours after the Catholic leader reaffirmed his Church’s actively homophobic stances.

Pope Francis today released a long-awaited report on ‘the family’ which was initially expected to relax teachings on sexuality – but actually reaffirmed all of the church’s actively anti-LGBT teachings.

In place of any changes to church doctrine, the Pope insisted that the Catholic Church would never consider recognition of “homosexual unions”, and added that gay people should receive “assistance” to bring them back to normality.

The Catholic leader wrote: “As for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”



However, just hours after the report came out Bernie Sanders told MSNBC he will go to the Vatican to see the Pope.

He said: “It was an invitation from the Vatican.

“I was very moved by the invitation, which was just made public today. I am a big, big fan of the Pope. Obviously there are areas where we disagree on women’s rights, gay rights, but he has played an unbelievable role, an unbelievable role in injecting a moral consequence into the economy.

“What he is saying is we need to pay attention to the dispossessed… he’s talking about the idolatry of money, the worship of money, the greed that’s out there. He’s trying to inject a sense of morality.”

A statement from the Sanders campaign said: “Pope Francis has made clear that we must overcome ‘the globalization of indifference’ in order to reduce economic inequalities, stop financial corruption and protect the natural environment.

“That is our challenge in the United States and in the world.”

The Vatican recently strong-armed France into ditching plans to appoint an openly gay ambassador.