A supporter holds up an "Ex-Pats for Bernie" sign as Bernie Sanders' motorcade makes its way to the Vatican ahead of the Vermont senator's speech there Friday. | AP Photo Bernie's holy detour The Vermont senator briefly abandons the New York campaign trail to pitch his populist message in Vatican City.

VATICAN CITY — Bernie Sanders traveled more than 4,000 miles in the dead of night, briefly abandoning the New York campaign trail, to bring his populist message here, as he invoked Pope Francis and his predecessors to decry wealth inequality, Wall Street, and the influence of corporate money on politics worldwide — lending his familiar message a global stage just hours after debating Hillary Clinton.

“Over a century ago, Pope Leo XIII highlighted economic issues and challenges in Rerum Novarum that continue to haunt us today, such as what he called ’the enormous wealth of a few as opposed to the poverty of the many,'” Sanders said on Friday, speaking at the conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of an encyclical by Pope John Paul II to mark the end of the Cold War. “That situation is worse today. In the year 2016, the top one percent of the people on this planet own more wealth than the bottom 99 percent, while the wealthiest 60 people — 60 people — own more than the bottom half: three and a half billion people."


Sanders, who arrived in Rome just hours after the feisty showdown in Brooklyn, spoke shortly after Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa, and he sat next to Bolivia's socialist president Evo Morales — set to speak on Saturday — at the conference, which looked more like a Capitol Hill hearing room than a grand religious gathering.

But Sanders' hope of meeting with Francis was not to be: the conference received an apologetic hand-written note from the pope, according to someone in the room, confirming that the pontiff would not be able to make it inside due to his travel to Greece on Saturday.

Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pope's chief spokesman, had confirmed on Thursday that there would be no meeting between the pope and Sanders, but people close to the campaign had been holding out hope.

After delivering his remarks, Sanders ventured outside Perugino's Gate during the conference's coffee break, greeting about two dozen American expats who were wearing Sanders campaign shirts and holding "Feel the Bern" signs. Received by a crush of local and international reporters, the clearly moved candidate said he felt that he had to accept the conference invitation even though the 40-hour trip is taking him off the political stump shortly before Tuesday's critical New York primary, where he trails Hillary Clinton by double-digits.

“It was something that I could just simply not refuse to attend,” Sanders told reporters, reiterating his frequently-articulated praise for Francis and pointing specifically to his message on the environment — noting that his views on the climate change have "played a profound role" in Sanders' work on the Senate Environmental Committee.

Speaking inside after a motorcade-enabled dash across Rome straight from the airport, Sanders hit on many of the driving themes that have dominated his surprising strong campaign, even invoking Wall Street and the Citizens United decision for his international audience packed with academics and the two South American leftist leaders.

“We can say that with unregulated globalization, a world market economy built on speculative finance bust through the legal, political, and moral constraints that had once served to protect the common good. In my country, home of the world’s largest financial markets, globalization was used as a pretext to deregulate the banks, ending decades of legal protections for working people and small businesses. Politicians joined hands with the leading bankers to allow the banks to become ’too big to fail,'” said the candidate, who frequently invokes Pope Francis in his political speeches.

“Inexplicably, the United States political system doubled down on this reckless financial deregulation, when the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of deeply misguided decisions, unleashed an unprecedented flow of money into American politics."

The speech ranged from Sanders’ thoughts on teachings of Popes as long as 120 years ago, to the Panama Papers, as he addressed the largely academic audience while quoting from the 1991 Centesimus Annus encyclical he was here to celebrate.

At times it sounded remarkably like his standard campaign speech — "Top bankers on Wall Street have shown no shame for their bad behavior and have made no apologies to the public, he said” — and at times it was more like a sprawling endorsement of Pope Francis.

“There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Church’s moral teachings on the market economy,” he said, also invoking Laudato Si’, the pontiff’s 2015 encyclical on the environment.

“The essential wisdom of Centesimus Annus is this: A market economy is beneficial for productivity and economic freedom. But if we let the quest for profits dominate society; if workers become disposable cogs of the financial system; if vast inequalities of power and wealth lead to marginalization of the poor and the powerless."

After his speech, Sanders then sat with the rest of the attendees in a small conference hall — as well as some of his family members —for the rest of the discussion.

Sitting next to Morales' now-vacant seat, Sanders repeated many of the leading themes of his campaign — specifically explaining to the others Goldman Sachs' recent settlement with the United States government, and invoking Detroit to make the case that school funding and economic inequality are widespread problems in the country.

Nick Gass contributed to this report.