ROME

Pope Francis dies at 88, on the day after Easter, having spent his last strength on mercy

He made a final, frail appearance to bless the Easter crowd, and died the next morning. For twelve years he tried to turn the Catholic Church toward the poor, the migrant and the forgotten, and he died as the world turned, hard, the other way.

Pope Francis died on the morning of April 21, at 88, a day after summoning the strength for a final Easter Sunday appearance in St Peter's Square, blessing from his wheelchair a crowd of thousands who did not know they were seeing him for the last time. He had been gravely ill for months, fighting the double pneumonia that hospitalised him in February, and his death, though long feared, still landed as the end of an era. For twelve years, the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit, the first to take the name of Francis, had tried, against fierce resistance within his own Church, to turn it outward and downward: toward the poor, the migrant, the imprisoned, the environment, the peripheries he insisted the Church existed to serve rather than the centres of power it too often courted.

He was a figure of genuine contradiction, and the obituaries will argue over him for years. He softened the Church's tone toward the divorced and gay Catholics without changing its doctrine, disappointing reformers and alarming traditionalists in equal measure. He was fierce on climate, poverty and the treatment of migrants, calling walls un-Christian and washing the feet of prisoners and refugees, and cautious to a fault on the abuse crisis that has hollowed out the Church's moral authority. But the through-line of his papacy was unmistakable and, in this moment, poignant: a relentless insistence, in an age increasingly enamoured of strength, wealth and contempt for the weak, that mercy was the heart of the thing, that a society and a Church would be judged by how they treated the least powerful among them. He died as the tide ran hard against everything he preached, an American administration dismantling foreign aid and deporting migrants to foreign prisons, a world turning toward walls and strongmen, and there was a terrible timeliness in the departure, this fortnight, of the one global figure who had spent his last breath arguing for the opposite.

THE ECONOMY

Tariff whiplash, and a trade war narrows to a duel with China

The tariff chaos entered a new phase of pure whiplash. Faced with the market carnage and bond-market alarm his "Liberation Day" tariffs unleashed, Trump abruptly paused most of the reciprocal levies for 90 days on April 9, sending stocks soaring in relief, while sharply escalating the confrontation with China, raising tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent as Beijing retaliated with 125 percent of its own. The global trade war narrowed, for now, into a direct and dangerous economic duel between the world's two largest economies, decoupling in real time, as businesses everywhere tried to plan amid a policy that could reverse itself between breakfast and lunch.

IN BRIEF

A defied order; a war on Harvard; a flight of billionaires

The confrontation between the courts and the executive deepened as the administration resisted a Supreme Court order to "facilitate" the return of a man it admitted it had wrongly deported to El Salvador, testing again whether any court can compel the president to undo a lawless act. The administration escalated its war on the universities, freezing billions in funding to Harvard and threatening its tax-exempt status after the university refused to submit to sweeping government demands over its governance and curriculum. And an all-female crew of celebrities, including a pop star, took a brief tourist hop to the edge of space aboard a rocket owned by one of the world's richest men, a spectacle of billionaire leisure that struck many, in the economic anxiety of the moment, as an emblem of an age out of joint.

The Column

A Muslim woman mourns a Christian pope

Pope Francis died this fortnight, and I, who am not Catholic and not Christian, grieve him. The grief is not sentiment. It is recognition of something rare enough to be worth naming precisely: power spent, deliberately and against its own institutional interest, to shield the powerless.

By Zainab Zaheer

Pope Francis died this fortnight, on the day after Easter, having spent his last strength on mercy, and I find myself in mourning for a man whose church I do not belong to and whose doctrine, on much that concerns me as a woman, I reject. I want to examine that grief rather than merely express it, because an unexamined grief is only a feeling, and this one, looked at closely, turns out to be an argument about what is rare and therefore precious in the exercise of power, and why a Muslim feminist can mourn a Catholic pope without either sentimentality or contradiction.

Simone Weil, who spent her brief and burning life at the threshold of a church she would not quite enter, gave me the concept I need for what Francis was. She wrote that the rarest and most difficult thing in the world is attention, real attention, the capacity to fully perceive the reality of another person, especially the afflicted, whose affliction makes us want to look away, and that this attention is not a warm feeling but a hard discipline, almost a form of genius, because everything in us conspires to reduce the suffering other to an abstraction we need not truly see. Most power, Weil understood, is organised precisely to avoid this attention, to keep the afflicted at the level of category and statistic where they make no claim on us. What was extraordinary about Francis, what I am actually mourning, was a man at the summit of one of the world's oldest hierarchies who kept insisting on attention, who went to Lampedusa to name the drowned migrants the world had agreed not to see, who washed the feet of prisoners and Muslims and the dying, who used the vast machinery of his office to force the powerful to look at exactly what power is built to look past.

Now the objection, and I will make it against myself with full force, because to skip it would be to write hagiography and I did not admire the man enough to insult him with that. The church Francis led still denies women the priesthood and much else; still holds doctrines on our bodies and our autonomy that have caused real suffering to real women; still moved, on the questions that touch my life most directly, with the glacial caution of an institution more concerned with its own continuity than with our freedom. To mourn him, the objection runs, is to let a warm personal style launder a cold institutional reality, to be seduced by the humility of the man into forgiving the intransigence of the office. This is not a cheap objection and I will not answer it cheaply. It is true. He did not change those things, and some of them are the architecture of my own oppression, and I do not forget it standing at his grave.

But here is what I have concluded, and it is why the grief survives the objection. To honour a person is not to endorse the institution they served, and the refusal to distinguish the two is a poverty of moral perception, not a rigour of it. I can hold, at once, that Francis led an institution that wronged women and that Francis himself spent his authority, more than any occupant of that chair in my lifetime, pushing that institution toward the afflicted and against the comfortable, at real cost to his standing with its own powerful. The radicalism was not in the doctrine, which he largely left as he found it; it was in the direction he bent the attention of a billion people, toward the migrant, the prisoner, the poor, the earth itself, and away from the respectable certainties that his office had for centuries been used to bless. That bending is not nothing. In a world where nearly all power flows toward protecting itself, a man who used the summit of power to make the powerful look at the powerless was doing the rarest thing Weil named, and doing it structurally, from the top, where it counts most and costs most.

So I mourn him as what he was, not as what his office remained: an old man who understood that mercy is not softness but the hardest discipline of attention, and who spent himself on it until there was nothing left. My own tradition teaches that the measure of a life is what it did for those with the least claim on it, and by that measure, which is not the measure of his church's doctrine but of something older and shared across his faith and mine, he lived well. I do not need to be Catholic to grieve a man who spent his power seeing the unseen. I only need to know how rare that is, and how dark the room is now that one of the few who insisted on the light has put it down.

The Ledger

A fortnight of mourning and market whiplash, AI in the background. The models advance; the question of whether the institutions and values that might humanely govern them can survive the age's turn toward strength grows sharper with the passing of one of its gentlest voices.

Data centers & power

The China tariff duel directly threatens the chip supply the AI build-out depends on; decoupling from the world's manufacturing centre in real time raises the cost and uncertainty of every physical input to the data-centre vision.

Rates

The 90-day tariff pause brought relief, but the whiplash itself is corrosive: businesses cannot plan against a policy that reverses weekly. The Fed holds amid a fog of manufactured uncertainty.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.83 percent (April 17), jumping amid the bond-market turmoil the tariffs unleashed. Even the mechanics of a mortgage now hostage to the daily lurches of trade policy.

India tech

India, granted the 90-day reprieve, races to negotiate a trade deal with Washington while positioning to absorb the supply chains fleeing a China now locked in a 145-percent tariff duel with America. Opportunity and peril, tangled, as ever.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The column on Francis extends this paper's deepest theme to its moral root: the treatment of the powerless is the truest test of any system, because it reveals what the system does when nothing forces it to be decent.

The Back Page

The tourists and the stranded

There was a striking juxtaposition this fortnight, and it is worth holding the two images side by side. In one, an all-female crew of celebrities, a pop star among them, strapped into a rocket owned by one of the richest men on Earth and took an eleven-minute hop to the edge of space and back, a carefully-produced spectacle of empowerment and leisure, weightless for a few minutes, home for lunch, the whole thing a kind of luxury experience for people to whom the universe is another amenity. And a few weeks earlier, in the other, two career astronauts came home after nine months stranded in orbit by a spacecraft that failed, carried out on stretchers, having spent the better part of a year doing unglamorous science in the great silence because a machine broke and they simply endured it. Both are "space." They could hardly be more different. The one was a product, a branded experience, space as the ultimate luxury good, purchased and consumed and posted. The other was the old thing, the real thing, the human being enduring the indifferent void because the work required it and there was no way home yet. I do not begrudge anyone a rocket ride, and the celebrity flight harmed no one. But in a fortnight of economic anxiety and a world turning hard toward the powerful, there was something about the contrast, the billionaire's guests playing at space for eleven curated minutes while the actual astronauts had just been carried off stretchers after nine months of the real thing, that felt like a small perfect emblem of the age: the spectacle and the substance, the purchased experience and the endured reality, the powerful playing at the thing the workers actually do. The old pope who died this same fortnight would, I think, have noticed which of the two the cameras were sent to.