If you were an ailing pope, one of the metal things you could do is gut it through Holy Week out of sheer force of will and die on Easter Monday. RIP, Francis. Happy Monday.
Pope Francis prays with priests in The Vatican on September 30, 2020. (Photo by Filippo Monteforte / AFP via Getty Images.)
by Joe Perticone
Vatican City
I WAS WALKING ALONG THE TIBER RIVER when a push notification delivered the news that Pope Francis, a pragmatic leader of the church who emphasized practicing compassion above nearly everything else, had died Monday morning after celebrating Easter.
I arrived in the Piazza San Pietro soon thereafter. It wasn’t immediately clear that others were aware of the news. But one by one, priests, nuns, and tourists—Christian and non-Christian alike—began staring at their phones, gasping, and covering their mouths in shock.
Crowds began to form. At the front of the non-ticketed fence, I turned around and suddenly the people behind me stretched back hundreds of feet. Women prayed the rosary along the fence, as the hordes of Vatican museum and grounds tours continued on as scheduled. Some even cried.
The first to arrive at St. Peter’s Square. (Joe Perticone, The Bulwark)
Previously named Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis was a Jesuit from Argentina who transformed the Church in many ways during his twelve-year tenure. After Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis took the reins of the world’s first and largest Christian denomination in 2013 and instilled a culture of caring and empathy that championed mercy for the most vulnerable and afflicted members of society.
That legacy would be enough to spark the mass mourning that I witnessed just minutes after his death was announced. But it’s the context in which his passing happened that makes it feel far more profound. Pope Francis’s compassion for immigrants came as governments across the world (and now most forcefully in the United States) have turned against them. His calls for ending war (indeed, his last public plea was to stop the violence in Gaza) came as regional conflicts have broken out with regularity. Two days before he passed, he met with Vice President JD Vance—a meeting that until the last minute seemed unlikley not just because of the Pope’s poor health but because of his clear discomfort with the Trump administration’s agenda.
Crowds form at St. Peter’s Square. (Joe Perticone, The Bulwark)
Francis was fiercely critical of conservatives within the church and beyond who sought to ignore or dismiss the poor, criminals, and migrants. Even in one of his final public appearances leading the stations of the cross on Good Friday, Francis made clear his disdain for the leaders and cultures that refuse to lend a helping hand to society’s most vulnerable.
“Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,” he said. “Theirs is the construction site of Hell.”
He was a decent man in indecent times. His voice, at this delicate moment, seems hard to replace.
As for the process of replacement, the next steps for the Catholic Church will include a mourning period, a funeral—which by Francis’s own design will be a less glamorous affair than in the past—and finally, a conclave to elect the next bishop of Rome. For Francis, the conclave took just over 24 hours. The next one could last longer. The future pope will have big shoes to fill.
Bill Kristol
Pete Hegseth has turned out to be the kind of secretary of defense many of us warned he’d be—immature, incompetent, untrustworthy, and manifestly unqualified.
Sharing detailed information about forthcoming military strikes in Yemen on his personal, insecure cell phone in a Signal group chat that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer—as the New York Times reported last night—would be a fireable offense in any other administration. It would surely be grounds for termination for the uniformed military or among the civilian Defense Department employees whom Hegseth supervises.
This leak to the Times follows Hegseth’s firing late last week of three of his most senior aides—including his chief of staff, Dan Caldwell; his deputy chief of staff, Darin Selnick; and the deputy secretary’s chief of staff, Colin Carroll. These Hegseth loyalists were all escorted from the Pentagon amid reports they had leaked sensitive information.
But all three aides proclaimed their innocence in a public statement on Saturday. And on Sunday, John Ullyot, who had worked directly for Hegseth before leaving the department last week, wrote that other Hegseth loyalists had “tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information.” But Ullyot claims that none of this is true.
“While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test,” he writes. “In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing.”
Ullyot—who is still a Trump loyalist—concludes that “Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.”
So the secretary’s office is in shambles, and Hegseth’s ability to lead the department—already called into question by so many of his other actions in his first three months—is shot. Hegseth should go and presumably will soon. Others in the administration and in the Pentagon are clearly out for him. As Tim Miller asked last night, who leaked the story to the Times?
Democratic senators on the Armed Services Committee began calling on Hegseth to resign last night. But as of Monday morning, none of the 50 Republican senators who’d voted to confirm him had said a word. Do they stand by their votes? Is it too much to ask of them to say Hegseth must go? A cascade of such statements by Republicans could induce Trump to remove him. After all, any one of them could have spared us three months of embarrassment and damaging and dangerous mismanagement had they simply voted ‘No’ three months ago.
Hegseth’s deputy, businessman Steve Feinberg, is by all accounts a sober and serious person. He’s no expert on defense policy, and I don’t know that he has the character to stand up to Trump, as Jim Mattis and Mark Esper did in Trump’s first term. But there’s a chance he would be at least competent and honest.
That alone would be a vast improvement.
Republican senators have done nothing to help this nation deal with the crisis we face. Indeed, their subservience to Trump has made things much worse. Replacing Hegseth may ultimately do little to repair to the damage Trump has done at home and abroad. But the long journey back to democratic accountability and political responsibility begins with a single step. Forcing the removal of Hegseth would be such a step.
STEPPING ON THE AID HOSE: The White House has long insisted that the human costs of its dismantling of USAID will be small, pointing to its ongoing commitment to funding many lifesaving programs. But in war-torn, famine-ravaged Sudan, where the United States spent $830 million on humanitarian aid last year, the New York Times reports on the dire consequences that have followed from a months-long stop in aid that “has resumed only in fits and starts, if at all.”
The U.S.A.I.D. officials who once helped make the payments have been fired. A work force of about 10,000 is being reduced to about 15 positions, leaving the American chain of assistance mired in chaos, delays and uncertainty.
So while the Trump administration says the tap for Sudan is still on, aid groups trying to stave off starvation say the total amount has been reduced and the entire system has been paralyzed, cutting off food for weeks at a time in a place where few can afford to miss a single meal. . . .
In Sudan, rates of acute child malnutrition in parts of the once-proud capital are 10 times above the emergency threshold, aid workers estimate.
The statistics are horrible. The anecdotes are worse. The lead is unconscionable: “The children died one after the other. Twelve acutely malnourished infants living in one corner of Sudan’s war-ravaged capital, Khartoum.”
Read the whole thing, if you’ve got the heart for it. (And you can donate to Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms here.)
MASK WAY OFF: The ax may fall on climate organizations tomorrow, Earth Day. Bloomberg News reports on what green groups are bracing for:
White House officials are preparing executive orders that would strip some environmental nonprofits of their tax-exempt status, setting up a possible Earth Day strike against organizations seen as standing in the way of President Donald Trump’s push for more domestic oil, gas and coal production.
Even broader steps have been contemplated, including possible investigations of environmental nonprofits’ activities and changes that could stifle funding for non-US organizations treated as charities, said the people, who asked not to be named because deliberations are private. The efforts could also have wider reach, extending beyond environmental groups to nonprofits that work on other issues as well as philanthropic organizations and foundations.
Trump hasn’t exactly been shy about his desire to play hardball with non-governmental organizations whose speech, beliefs, or activism he dislikes. Most notably, he’s called for Harvard University to lose its tax-exempt status in recent days—and on Thursday, he cast a wider net, saying he would be “making some statements” about groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that are “so rich, so strong, and then they go so bad.”
That this new executive order would come on Earth Day goes to show you how much this is about pissing certain people off more than any actual governing philosophy.
VANISHED FROM A DATABASE: What’s it like to be in the crosshairs of a White House that’s not particularly constrained by law, and not particularly careful to avoid mistakes—all while belonging to an institution that’s eager to show said White House that it’s a willing partner?
Hundreds of college students are learning the answer to that question. The Department of Homeland Security has been terminating student records in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a public database tracking international students in the United States. But as the Intercept reports, DHS admitted in court this week that changes to SEVIS records “have no bearing on a student’s lawful nonimmigrant status.” That would likely come as a relief to these students—if not for the fact they’d already been told by their schools that their removal from SEVIS indicates “that they have thus lost their immigrant status and must immediately leave the country.”
The Intercept goes on:
“Under pressure from ICE, schools have been advising students they are out of status after SEVIS record termination, and in many cases disenrolling them as a result,” said Nathan Yaffe, an attorney representing international students facing deportation in other cases. “Now ICE has submitted sworn declarations that SEVIS record termination has no legal effect on the student whatsoever.”
“Any school that continues to disenroll (and refuses to re-enroll) students is voluntarily punishing students to align itself with the Trump administration’s agenda,” Yaffe said. “Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”
It’s a trademark sort of boondoggle for this White House and its shoot-first, ask-legal-questions-never approach. In this case, the administration may be in a legal gray area about trying to yank visas from foreign students they want to kick out. But instead, they’re just deleting those students from a database and trusting that the schools, eager not to be the next one in the White House’s crosshairs, will do the dirty work for them. And it’s working.
