Bloomberg has updated and fleshed out their story. A Sanders spokesman says the invitation came from the Vatican, which is obviously true, but that doesn’t address the question of Sanders having asked. The chancellor of the Academy says he invited Sanders “(q)uite some time ago,” but wouldn’t say who initiated the contact.
Archer says Sanders made the first move a few days ago, and:
“His use of it is clearly a pretext. There are just 20 academics and there will be nothing of policy relevance.”
And then there’s this:
Sanders earlier on Friday said, “this is an invitation from the Vatican, from a pope that I have enormous respect for in term of the level of consciousness that he’s raising on the need to have morality in our economy."
The office of the pope moved quickly to distance the pontiff from Sanders’s visit. Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s spokesman, said Sanders had been invited “not by the pope but by the pontifical academy of social sciences.”