The death of Pope Francis.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 15 minutes.

Correction.

In our April 14 “Under the radar” section covering a new Colorado gun-control law, we originally wrote that Colorado residents can circumvent the state’s requirements by purchasing semi-automatic firearms in other states. The opposite is true: Federal law requires gun dealers to abide by the laws of the state where the buyer lives. This was a frustrating instance of moving too quickly while researching a story and misreading a key sentence. 

This is our 134th correction in Tangle's 298-week history and our first correction since April 16. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

A controversial reader essay.

This Sunday, reader Rebekah Spicuglia authored a provocative argument for why she — as a mother whose son was killed by MS-13 — opposes President Trump’s recent El Salvador deportations. You can read the entirety of Rebekah’s challenging essay here.

Quick hits.

We’re sharing 10 quick hits today to cover the news-heavy three-day weekend. 

1. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing a group of Venezuelan men currently in immigration custody from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act while a lower court hears a challenge to the removals. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. (The ruling)
2. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a plan to reorganize the State Department, saying the changes would target “decades of bloat and bureaucracy” at the department. (The plan)
3. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a one-day ceasefire against Ukraine in observance of Easter, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia continued its attacks during the period. The move follows remarks by Secretary of State Rubio that the U.S. was considering halting its efforts to broker a peace deal between the sides. (The latest) 
4. An Israeli military probe found “several professional failures” in a series of Israel Defense Forces shootings in March that killed 15 paramedics and rescue workers in Gaza. The military said a commander would be dismissed over the incident. (The report)
5. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly used his personal phone to share information about U.S. military operations in Yemen in a Signal group chat that included his wife and brother. Hegseth denies the report. (The story) Separately, President Donald Trump denied an NPR report that the White House had begun the search for a new Defense secretary. (The report and the comments)
6. U.S. and Iranian officials met in Italy with Omani intermediaries for a second round of discussions on Iran’s nuclear program. The sides agreed to a third round of talks in Oman later this week. (The talks)
7. Harvard University sued the Trump administration, alleging that its freezing of roughly $2.2 billion in grants violated the First Amendment and other federal laws and regulations. (The suit)
8. DHL Express announced it would suspend deliveries of consumer packages to the U.S. valued at over $800 due to new customs requirements imposed as part of the Trump administration’s tariffs. (The suspension)
9. Amid reports that President Donald Trump is considering firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, U.S. markets declined Monday but rebounded on Tuesday morning. (The numbers) 
10. Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the federal government will resume collections on defaulted student loans on May 5; the collections had been paused since the start of the pandemic. (The announcement)

Today's topic.

Pope Francis’s passing. On Monday, the Vatican announced Pope Francis died at the age of 88. Francis, the Catholic Church’s 266th pope, had led the Church since 2013 as a relatively progressive pontiff, grounding many of his beliefs in social and economic justice. The pope’s cause of death was identified as a stroke that led to a coma and heart failure; the stroke followed his February 14 hospitalization with double pneumonia. He recovered and was released from the hospital on March 23 but made few public appearances. On Sunday, he blessed a crowd of thousands in St. Peter's Square after Easter Mass, his final public appearance.

Back up: Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, making him the first pope from the Americas and from the Jesuit order — a religious order of clerics within the Catholic Church. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969 and was made a cardinal in 2001 by Pope John Paul II. In 2013, Francis was elected pope after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI amid widespread internal conflict over the Church’s administration, financial management, and response to a burgeoning sexual abuse crisis. 

Early in his papacy, Pope Francis sought to address these issues, spearheading efforts to reform the Vatican’s finances and overhaul its bureaucracy while making significant moves to decentralize the Church’s power structure. He initially took less concrete action to address the Church’s sexual abuse scandals (and at times faced criticism for appearing to defend accused church members) but later implemented new procedures for responding to allegations of sexual misconduct. Notably, the pope also formally apologized to groups around the world for the Church’s past actions. 

Francis brought other significant changes to the Church, pursuing more inclusive policies, centering the plight of migrants and marginalized groups, and speaking out on contemporary issues like climate change and President Donald Trump’s policies. He wrote several papal encyclicals urging world leaders to take action on environmental issues and attempted to make inroads with the Islamic world and China to repair strained relations. Furthermore, he criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and reiterated his call for a ceasefire in the conflict in his final public address on Sunday. 

During the 2016 presidential election, Francis controversially responded to a question about then-candidate Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border by saying, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” In February, he also criticized the Trump administration’s deportation efforts and appeared to directly rebuke Vice President JD Vance for suggesting that Catholic doctrine justified these policies.

On Sunday, the pope met briefly with Vance, who visited the Vatican over the weekend. After the Vatican announced the Pope’s death, Vance posted on X that he was “happy to see him yesterday, though he was obviously very ill” and shared a homily Francis delivered in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. President Trump ordered flags to be flown at half staff in honor of the pope’s passing. 

The Church will now hold a papal election, called a conclave, to choose the 267th pope, who is elected by a two-thirds majority of the College of Cardinals.

Today, we’ll share reactions to Pope Francis's death from the right and left. Then, my take.

What the right is saying.

• The right acknowledges Pope Francis’s steadfast concern for the poor but suggests his papacy did not help the interests of disadvantaged groups. 
• Some say the pope’s legacy will be a failed attempt at progressive reformation.
• Others say his messaging on global issues hurt the Church’s credibility.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said Pope Francis “championed the poor while favoring ideas that keep them poor.”

“Pope Francis was best known for urging concern for the poor, in the best Christian tradition. He called for a clergy of ‘shepherds who have the smell of their sheep’—that is, priests and nuns who shared the suffering of their neighbors. He made support for the weakest among us the rhetorical centerpiece of his papacy,” the board wrote. “Alas, Pope Francis believed ideologies that keep the poor in poverty. One of those earthly dogmas is radical environmentalism, which isn’t about keeping the earth clean for human beings but keeping the earth for itself and treating man as the enemy.”

“His papacy was marked by anti-Americanism, and not merely against Donald Trump. He seemed to believe that Latin America is poor because the United States is rich. That’s a recipe for stagnation and despair because the real reasons so many in Latin America languish in poverty are at home,” the board said. “The irony is that this progressivism is most popular in places like Europe where the Sunday pews are empty. The Church is thriving in Africa and among younger orthodox Catholics in the West looking for meaning in life beyond material consumption.”

In The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson argued “the legacy of Pope Francis is chaos, confusion, and division.”

“As Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio, Francis was politically on the left, with strong anti-American and anti-conservative tendencies that would manifest themselves in the years to come. But he also had a reputation in Argentina for personal austerity and humility, doctrinal conservatism, and working closely with the poor. It was possible, in those very early days, to imagine that he could be a pontiff to bring together the warring factions of the church and forge a path into the 21st century for a united Catholic Church,” Davidson wrote. “But it wasn’t to be.”

“It didn’t take long for liberal reformers in the Catholic hierarchy — especially those in western Europe who had done so much to elect him — to see that in Francis they had a pope that would be willing, for reasons of his own, to push the boundaries of Catholic doctrine on contentious moral issues like homosexuality, marriage and divorce, and the ordination of women,” Davidson said. “Under Francis, great changes in the Catholic Church always seemed to be on the way but never arrived in full. Time and again, what Francis gave with one hand he withdrew with the other. The result was not some big reform or change in doctrine leading to schism, but deepening chaos and division in a church already on the brink of open war.”

In The Washington Post, George Weigel wrote “Pope Francis oversaw a steep decline in the Vatican’s role as a global witness.”

“Francis was much appreciated for his personal warmth and many public displays of compassion for troubled souls. But the Vatican’s declining influence on the world stage was another, and lamentable, feature of his papal tenure,” Weigel said. “The gravest of Francis’s mistakes was a 2018 agreement with Beijing that gave the Chinese Communist Party a leading role in the appointment of Catholic bishops in China and led, at one point, to the Chinese regime unilaterally changing the boundaries of the country’s Catholic dioceses.”

“Then there was Ukraine. Although the Argentine pope eventually requested prayers for ‘martyred Ukraine,’ he originally blamed the conflict partly on ‘NATO barking at Russia’s doors,’ and later termed the war one of ‘imperial interests, not just of the Russian empire, but of empires from elsewhere,’” Weigel wrote. “And there was also what seemed to many to be a further indulgence in moral equivalence — the pope’s commentary during the first days of Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023 — which did unnecessary damage to Catholic-Jewish relations while further eroding the Vatican’s stature as a voice of moral reason.”

What the left is saying.

• The left praises Pope Francis’s legacy on humanitarian issues and the reforms he brought to the Church.
• Some say that while the pope’s record was imperfect, he ultimately made the Church a more inclusive place.
• Others suggest that the Church will elect a more conservative pope in line with a global shift to the right. 

The Washington Post editorial board said “Pope Francis pulled the Catholic Church into the 21st century.”

“Francis was initially expected to focus mainly on cleaning up a scandal-plagued Vatican. Instead he fashioned a profoundly reformist papacy, deeply divisive within the Roman Catholic Church, that sought to fundamentally reorient the institution as more liberal and less beholden to its own hierarchy, which he left less White, less Eurocentric and less bound by tradition. These shifts made the church decidedly more global, modern and inclusive,” the board wrote. “His new thinking triggered resentments and fury from traditionalists, who saw him as abandoning core church principles, as well as despair from some liberals, who wished for an even more sweeping and substantive overhaul.”

“Francis often fought the right fights. He embraced the struggle against climate change and the plights of persecuted religious minorities, the poor in the Global South, and migrants and refugees, in whose honor he unveiled a monument in St. Peter’s Square,” the board said. “The extent to which Francis’s legacy will endure is likely to be determined largely by the selection of his successor. He will be chosen by members of the College of Cardinals under the age of 80, a cohort now dominated by prelates picked by Francis himself — many of them, like him, from Africa, Asia or South America.”

In MSNBC, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons wrote about “what Pope Francis meant to LGBTQ Christians like me.”

“The late pope’s nonjudgemental approach to LGBTQ issues did not go far enough for many LGBTQ advocates. But it’s important to judge his legacy in the context of the Catholic Church, and to recognize how remarkable his approach was given the institutional norms that for decades suppressed and ignored LGBTQ devotees,” Graves-Fitzsimmons said. “For many LGBTQ Christians like myself, the changes Francis championed feel personal. I’ve experienced both the sting of exclusion and the quiet hope that, perhaps one day, church pews will be filled with all those who long to find God’s love, regardless of whom they love.”

“The Vatican did back up the merciful media soundbites reverberating around the world with some substantive policy changes, including allowing transgender people to be baptized and serve as godparents, and allowing priests to offer blessings of same-sex couples. These changes did not amount to full equality, but they were meaningful progress toward recognizing the God-given dignity of LGBTQ people,” Graves-Fitzsimmons wrote. “Francis’ plea for mercy for the vulnerable, whether LGBTQ people or migrants, is both remarkable — and basic Christianity. In many ways it’s a sad reflection of what we expect of Christian leaders to find Pope Francis so revolutionary.”

In Jacobin, Pablo Castaño suggested “after Pope Francis, a Catholic move rightward seems likely.”

“There may come a time when we look back on the last decade as an anomaly in the modern history of the Catholic Church. Pope Francis — the figurehead of these years, and a radical by the standards of the Catholic hierarchy — is gone, and we are now likely to see a major shift in the political orientation of the Holy See,” Castaño said. “Francis’s ascension to the papacy… marked a break with the geopolitical orientation of his predecessors, as he aligned the Holy See much more closely with the Global South. While John Paul II had been a staunch ally of Washington in the so-called fight against communism, Francis made sure to distance himself from Western governments on issues such as relations with China, Ukraine, and Palestine.”

“It is difficult to predict the outcome of the forthcoming conclave. However, there are strong reasons to believe that Francis’s successor will be a more conservative pope. First, his pontificate has been highly transformative, both institutionally and in its public messaging, making it unlikely that the cardinals will choose another candidate equally inclined toward reform,” Castaño wrote. “Perhaps more importantly, although the Sistine Chapel has thick walls, the Vatican is invariably influenced by global political trends. With Trump in the White House, and with the far right on the rise worldwide, electing another pope as progressive as Francis would be swimming against the tide — and the Vatican has a long history of adapting to changing realities rather than confronting them.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• I don’t write about religious news professionally, but Pope Francis still matters to me.
• He spoke out on issues in a way that felt genuine and necessary for a faith leader.
• Francis also alienated people and was controversial politically, leaving his legacy uncertain.

A couple times a month I’ll start a take with “this is not an area I feel particularly knowledgeable in,” and today is one of those times. Being a U.S. politics reporter does not typically make one an expert on the Pope or the Catholic Church — a lot of Catholic writers or beat reporters (some cited above) cover the Vatican and religious news regularly. But Pope Francis’s passing does matter to me as a person of faith, a Jew who has spent a lot of time studying various religions, thinking about faith and G-d*, and paying attention to Pope Francis’s rise. (*To answer a common reader question about why I don’t spell out the word G-d, you can go here). 

Pope Francis also matters to me as a politics reporter who sees the world through a Western, U.S.-centric lens. The pope is not only a religious leader but a head of state, and Francis had a particular worldview and political approach that was not easy to ignore. He wasn’t afraid to kick the bushes, to take a stand, or to shake up an institution that needed it. 

For instance, I believe the Bible is unambiguous about the treatment we should give the poor and refugees, the resistance we should have toward war and violence, and the tolerance we should express towards others — even those we view as “sinners.” Pope Francis seemed to embody those principles; he at least attempted to usher in a more vibrant and inclusive church, which I don’t just mean in the modern, “progressive” sense. He also was not “liberal” in a Western sense. Yes, he was more accepting of gay and trans people than other major religious figures (which to some was good and others bad), but he also understood that Catholicism’s relevance was fading and the Church’s reputation was in tatters, so he looked upon the Church’s traditions and assumptions with fresh eyes — which sometimes led to more liberal-coded decision making. During the conclave that led to his election, he called on the church not just to open its windows and let in some fresh air, but to get out and go to the places the people are. 

He was also outspoken about a number of very real issues one might expect the pope to be outspoken about. He did not shy away from speaking the truth about the horrors of war in Gaza and more broadly, a truth many of us have become too numb to. He spoke on behalf of the billions of people living in poverty, especially in the Global South, and he framed environmentalism as a will to cherish the gift G-d gave us in planet Earth (and it is a gift). During moments of darkness, like the outbreak of Covid, he offered powerful and moving words of guidance (I was happy to see JD Vance share this homily in his honor on X on Sunday). 

Advocating for the poor, resisting war, demanding we love the planet, comforting the masses in perilous times — these strike me as deeply valuable and obvious actions for the pope to take, and seem like Catholic teachings that are as vital as ever in the year 2025.

But, like all men, he had flaws. He took too long to implement real reforms to address the Church’s sexual assault scandals, and spent too much time providing cover for some of the Church’s worst actors. He waded into some global conflicts in ways I found shockingly ignorant, like when he blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on NATO encroachment or seemed to softly excuse the murdering of French cartoonists for satirical drawings of Muhammad, insisting one cannot “make fun of faith.”

He did, indeed, champion the poor; but he did so by demonizing wealth and comfort, blaming all manner of ills across the world on countries like the United States. He did this while cozying up to China, despite its own abysmal human rights record, staying silent even as it imprisoned Jimmy Lai, perhaps the most prominent Catholic figure in the whole country.

One view that does not seem in doubt is that Pope Francis introduced some chaos to the Church; he famously said he wanted a mess, and he seems to have gotten one. His edicts were frequently controversial or unclear, his pontificate surfaced divisions among Catholics, and his time as pope ends with a widespread expectation that his replacement will hold a different worldview than his — i.e., a backlash against his papacy.

With all his positive qualities, this is perhaps his greatest failure of all: The pope did not seem to move the hearts and minds of many of his detractors. He was disruptive, undoubtedly. But was he persuasive? Will his views endure? Will his unorthodox approach resonate for centuries or even decades? Those answers seem much less clear to me. Judging by the response to his death, he did more to fracture and frustrate than to unify and compel, which is a difficult legacy to endorse even if you believe in many of his aims. 

Take the survey: What kind of legacy do you think Pope Francis will leave behind? Let us know!

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Your questions, answered.

Q: This year we have trillions of dollars of debt coming due and that needs to be refinanced. That debt currently has a lower rate (~2% ish) and rates are double that right now. If we refinance that debt at a higher rate, we will automatically be paying billions of more in interest ‘for nothing.’ A case could be made that we actually want Trump to crash the economy, lower the interest rate, refinance the debt that is coming due, and not pay 100s of billions dollars in interest. It will be painful for many but ultimately save our country billions of dollars. If this actually were Trump’s grand plan, would this not be a good thing for the broader economic picture? 

— Keelyn from Denver, CO

Tangle: We really don’t know if that benefit would be worth the cost, but more importantly it’s probably not going to happen at all.

Yes, it’s true that nearly $3 trillion of U.S. debt, much of it short term, will mature in 2025. Since the government routinely runs a deficit, it won’t be able to pay its debts from revenue and will instead have to refinance that debt (or take out new loans) to pay bondholders back. That would mean, in theory, that the government would want lower interest rates on new bonds to reduce its future debt.

When we talked about what Trump wanted from issuing individualized global tariffs and pursuing a high effective tariff rate (which, by the way, is higher today than it was before Trump announced the pause), we mentioned all the goals we were hearing from the administration: spurring manufacturing, negotiating better trade deals, and — as championed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — bringing down the yield on Treasury notes (T-notes), a goal driven in large part by a desire to refinance government debt at a lower interest rate. If rates were to drop below 3%, that would certainly be a good thing for the government’s debt problem — though arguably not worth the turmoil that accompanied tariffs.

But that’s a hypothetical; while the interest on the 10-year T-note did drop following the initial tariff announcement, it then began to climb as foreign bond-holders — including important geopolitical allies — started selling instead of buying new bonds. The yield has since fluctuated, and is now nowhere close to dropping under 4% (let alone 3%). Furthermore, $7.6 trillion in government bonds — 31% of all U.S. government debt at the time — already matured over a twelve-month span starting September of 2023, meaning the right time to address this particular fiscal problem may have already passed.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners are reportedly the top contenders to win the government contract to build key parts of a new U.S. missile defense system. The Pentagon has received interest from more than 180 companies seeking to work on the “next-generation missile defense shield” specified in President Trump’s January 27 executive order. SpaceX’s bid, which includes software-maker Palantir and drone-builder Anduril, proposes building and launching 400–1,000 satellites to sense missiles and track their movement, in addition to a separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers. SpaceX has also broached the idea of establishing the system as a subscription service that the government would pay to access, rather than owning it outright. White House officials stressed that their planning for the system is still in the early stages. Reuters has the story.

Numbers.

• 7.5. The average length, in years, of the tenures of the Catholic Church’s first 265 popes. 
• 12. The length, in years, of Pope Francis’s papacy.
• 65. The number of states and territories visited by Pope Francis. 
• 942. The number of new saints created by Pope Francis, the most of any pope in history. 
• 15–20. The number of days after a pope’s death or resignation that the College of Cardinals begins the process of electing a new pope.
• 108, 22, and 6. The number of members of the College of Cardinals appointed by Popes Francis, Benedict XVI and John Paul II, respectively.
• 84%. The percentage of U.S. Catholics who expressed a favorable view of Pope Francis in March 2013, according to Pew Research.
• 78%. The percentage of U.S. Catholics who expressed a favorable view of Pope Francis in February 2025. 
• 88% and 69%. The percentage of U.S. Catholics who lean Democratic and Republican, respectively, who expressed a favorable view of Pope Francis in February 2025. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just published a Friday mailbag edition.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was Ken Griffey Jr.’s pictures at The Masters.
• Nothing to do with politics: A Kansas babysitter checked under the bed for monsters and found someone.
• Thursday’s survey: 4,803 readers answered our survey on the Supreme Court’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia ruling with 91% interpreting the ruling as saying the government must try to bring him back. “The government can't be sloppy with deportations AND be unwilling to fix mistakes,” one respondent said. 

Have a nice day.

In honor of Earth Day, Jefferson County, Colorado, provides a story of resilience and regrowth. Last summer, the Quarry Fire burned through 579 acres of forest in and around the county, leaving the area in need of replanting. Most plant nurseries begin growing trees for fire-recovery projects one year after a fire, but OneCanopy — a local nursery that keeps thousands of seeds frozen and on-hand — began growing trees for Jefferson County within months. “We might not be able to sit under the shade of these trees, but the hope is the future generations will, and that’s why we do what we do,” OneCanopy Director of Operations Katelynn Martinez said. Yahoo News has the story.

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