Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor.

Most weekdays, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Today, though, we're looking back at some notable lives, the inspired and inspiring figures who died this year.

Pope Francis shunned fancy vestments and paid surprise visits to prisons and hospitals.

The most open-minded Pope for many years changed the Catholic Church,

but not as much as he hoped.

Our obituries editor Anne Roe

remembered a reform-minded pontiff

who preferred to be among his flock.

Some wondered what could have motivated him. He was such a gregarious smiling, curious figure, always interested in what was going on around him.

They wondered whether all this energy and tremendous speed with which he was trying to do things

was an attempt to make up for something. He had been the Bishop of Buenos Aires during

Argentina's dirty war in the late 1970s and 1980s. Possibly he'd made mistakes there or failed to do

something that he was trying to make up for.

But it seemed more likely that his motivation was simply to change the appearance of the church.

To change it from this giant institution, which seemed to have made a good many missteps in recent years,

to a place of mercy for everybody.

This was the most important aspect he wanted the church to be a merciful church.

And he lived every day of his life in that ambition.

Many American vice presidents have an unremarkable tenure out of the spotlight.

Dick Cheney broke that mold.

He was the most powerful, the most divisive and most consequential veep of the modern age.

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