Bernie Sanders meets with Pope Francis in Vatican

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Satuday that he met with Pope Francis in the Vatican and told the pontiff of his “admiration” for his “moral teachings on the market economy,” U.S. media reported.

“Today certainly was the highlight of the trip” to Vatican City, Sanders said on NBC News about his brief meeting with the pope, which lasted five minutes and took place at 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning at the pope’s residence.

“I conveyed to him my great admiration for the extraordinary work that he is doing all over the world in demanding that morality be part of our economy,” Sanders told reporters later on his flight back to New York, according to the daily New York Times.

According to Jeffrey Sachs, an assessor of Sanders who was present at the meeting, the pope thanked the Democratic hopeful “for coming to the meeting and for coming to speak about the moral economy.”

Sanders took part this Friday in a symposium in Vatican City on economic and social issues, in commemoration of the “Centesimus Annus” encyclical of Pope John Paul II, at which were also present the presidents of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, and of Bolivia, Evo Morales.

In his brief meeting with the pope, the rival of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries for the U.S. presidential election in November also praised the encyclical published by Pope Francis last year, in which he asked for more action against climate change.

The meeting came shortly before the Democratic primaries in New York, the state where Sanders was born and which Clinton represented in the Senate, and which will be contested next Tuesday in highly competitive balloting.

According to the media, surveys taken by the online pollster Real Clear Politics give Clinton the advantage in New York with 53.1 percent of voter preference, compared with 39.3 percent for Sanders.

Meanwhile, Sanders published Friday his income tax return, in which his income appears miniscule in comparison with that of rival Hillary Clinton.

In 2014, the year for which Sanders published his return, the veteran senator from Vermont earned $205,271 and paid, filing jointly with his wife Jane, 13.5 percent in federal income tax, which came to $27,653.

These figures fall far short of Clinton’s, who together with her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, earned close to $140 million over the past eight years.