Hello and welcome to the Reason Roundtable. This is the podcast of Free Minds, Free Markets, and Free Takes.

I'm your host, Peter Sutterman. Sad news this Easter Monday, Pope Francis has died. Francis' papacy began in 2013.

He was perceived as a progressive, transformative figure for the Catholic Church, not always in ways that pleased his conservative critics.

So this is somewhat outside our usual ambit on this podcast, unless of course Stephanie Slade is here.

But the Catholic Church is a major world institution with implications for politics.

Notably, J.D. Vance, Vice President of United States, was in Rome to speak with the Pope this weekend.

So what are your thoughts on his legacy in passing, Matt Welch? Let's start with you.

I think I'm the only person who even sporadically attends a Catholic church. And weirdly enough,

he just didn't come up in the last 10 years, but that's very idiosyncratic towards the local church that I go to.

He was the Pope of

inequality. He was the pickety pope in many senses. And you look at the reasons archives from

2015. We get a lot of that. I would single him out for one piece of criticism that'll probably

get lost today is that after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he talked a lot about how, well, you can't just insult

religions. That was not a robust response. I'm sure other people will have something to say about

his views on capitalism. But at least he lived to a ripe old age of 88. And my heart's out to people

who are mourning him today.

Nicholas.

I was not fond of Pope Francis because he criticized capitalism more than he criticized Fidel

Castro.

And I think that's a tremendous failing when you consider him in the shadow of somebody like

John Paul II, who was equally

theologically serious and conservative, if that's your bag, because Francis was a theological

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