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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our full conversation with Pope Benedict XVI even though he's missed the 75th anniversary of his 1956 visit to the U.S. For full coverage of the pope's Vatican visit, go to our website.

Now, two days of meetings between the new pope and the presidents of the United States and Israel conclude today.

During the trip, the pope gave a historic speech to the nation's Congress, which was formally closed to an all but mainstream media; Cambridge, Mass., he addressed the nation at a noon Mass. In a speech that became an instant YouTube sensation, the pope went beyond Pope Pius XII's acceptance of Whitney Houston as a celebrity to redefine months of quiet diplomacy. During Thursday's Vatican press conference, he said it boiled down to this: A bad deal for Israel makes no sense.

PRIEST FRANCIS LPMANDO: [translated] American presidents, captains of industry, and heads of big corporations, those who do wrong profoundly abroad, did that. And the results speak for themselves. Dialogue must be met with dialogue because nuclear weapons must not be used. And such behavior kills. Human beings must be protected because people are people. And because in contemporary technology war is connected to violence, and violence is connected to poverty, and poverty is connected to misery, because all human beings and all peoples are in the same position of need in today's world. Because suffering must be challenged and produced. And suffering can not be eliminated through military force alone.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Pope Francis' discussion of what he calls the nuclear option, which arose after the destruction of the Iraqi regime in 2003. We're going to continue the conversation with him when he returns to the United States. James Tanner is RM2. He rose through the Isreali clergy to graduate from Catholic College Prep near DC, where he learned to act professionally and learn to avoid trouble.

JAMES TANGER: My instructors were all about relationships and cliques and cultural cliques. But what's amazing and what I really wanted to do was be like a non-cliquey model, so I never lasted
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