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It looks as if Senator Bernie Sanders’s brief Roman holiday will not include a meeting with Pope Francis.

In a routine briefing with reporters in the Vatican press office on Thursday, the spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was asked if the pope would meet with academics and politicians, including Mr. Sanders, who are participating in a Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences conference on Friday.

“There won’t be a meeting with the Holy Father,” Father Lombardi said.

A papal encounter was always going to be a long shot for Mr. Sanders, whose trip is not on an official visit to the Holy See. The politician was never scheduled to have an audience with Pope Francis, and the conference is not exactly the “high-level meeting” that the Sanders campaign billed it as in its news release about the trip. But as recently as Wednesday, Mr. Sanders was still hopeful for a face-to-face with the pontiff.

“It’s something I would be very proud to see happen,” Mr. Sanders told The Washington Post about the prospect of meeting Pope Francis. “I believe that the pope has been an inspirational figure in raising public consciousness about the kind of income and wealth inequality we are seeing all over this world.”

While Father Lombardi seemed to dash those hopes, Pope Francis has proved his unpredictability time and time again. And while he has generally avoided intervening in a country’s politics, he sometimes can’t resist.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said in February when a reporter asked him about Donald J. Trump.

Many have questioned the timing of Mr. Sanders’s trip, only days before next week’s crucial New York primary for his campaign. Instead of having potentially important campaign stops before Tuesday’s vote, the Vermont senator will be out of the country.