From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, April 24th.

As the world remembers Pope Francis, there's always the question of who and what comes next. These questions for the church

are very much related to the culture war and political questions in the rest of society. For example,

an op-ed in the New York Post by Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, a conservative review,

said Francis was meant to be a pope for the age of globalization.

The political consensus on both sides of the Atlantic favored free trade and high levels of

immigration. The question was only how high? The entire planet would soon be a single community,

and all that remained to do is reconcile the United

States and Europe with the global South. That called for reminding wealthy Americans and Europeans

of their duties to the world's poor. It continues with same-sex marriage triumphant. The Catholic

Church seemed to be on the losing side of the West's culture war, its future dependent on negotiating the best

possible terms of surrender. And then later it sort of concludes, but if Francis was the

pope for a globalist era, what the Catholic Church needs now is a populist pope, one who understands

that if the church renews its ties to the working class

within the West, not just in the global south, it will find ready converts. So some excerpts

from that op-ed in the New York Post. Obviously, people on the other side of the culture wars and with

different views on what Jesus would want differ from that. We'll get the

analysis and views now, and we'll open up the phones with Daniel Rober, chair of the Catholic

Studies Department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. One of his recent articles

in the Catholic-oriented Common Wheel magazine is about the transition to an unknown future after

Francis. Dr. Rober, thank you for joining us. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you for having me. It's great to be on.

First, on the legacy of Francis himself, before we talk about the future, you wrote an article that

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