View this email in your browser 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.

April 22, 2025

Francis’ ‘Down to Earth’ Papacy

It’s quite possible that Pope Francis—who died the day after Easter, at age 88—will be remembered globally in the terms used by The New Yorker’s Paul Elie: as the pope who “took Roman Catholicism back to street level and brought the papacy down to earth.”
 
Indeed, Francis’ soft heart and (relatively) left-leaning politics feature prominently in worldwide discussion of his legacy. At the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, columnist Ferruccio de Bortoli refers to Francis as an “apostle of peace” who was “more of a friend to the poor than to the powerful.” At the Spanish daily El País, Rome-based correspondent Íñigo Domínguez writes, “With a character at times impulsive and energetic, he certainly passed like a whirlwind through the social sphere, with an unprecedented critique of today’s capitalist system, and in internal [Church] reforms, with uneven results. Along the way, he opened strong divisions.”
 
At US Catholic, Nicholas Hayes-Mota writes that Francis called the Church to the “peripheries” of society: “From washing the feet of young prisoners on Holy Thursday, to embracing a disfigured man in St. Peter’s square, to preaching on the shores of [the Italian island] Lampedusa (a hub for migrant refugees), his first year in office was filled with public displays of mercy that ‘went viral.’  Even social media, he showed, could be a vehicle for the gospel.”
 
The New Yorker’s Elie sums up much of this aspect of Francis, writing, “[T]he images from Francis’s first weeks in office are still fresh in mind: returning to the hotel where he’d stayed prior to his election to pay his bill, setting up residence in a plain modern guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace, trading the papal Mercedes-Benz for a Fiat. This Pope was new in many respects: the first Jesuit Pope, the first Pope from the Americas, the first to take the name Francis, after the Italian saint known for his embrace of poverty and his care for the natural world. The years that followed were defined by a series of striking acts: the Pope answering a reporter’s question about gay clergy with the offhand ‘Who am I to judge?’ … Issuing ‘Laudato Si’,’ a landmark encyclical about the climate emergency. Celebrating a Mass in the Philippines attended by six million. Visiting the Central African Republic during a civil war. … Showing up at Russia’s Embassy to the Holy See in an aggrieved response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Calling out Israel’s air strikes in Gaza for their harm to unarmed civilians. Authorizing priests to bless gay Catholic couples informally.”
 
As the wire service AFP notes, Francis ascended amid grave Church scandals over sex abuse. He called an “unprecedented” summit on the problem and defrocked a US cardinal, but AFP points to a mixed record overall: “On his foreign trips from Canada to Belgium Pope Francis met with survivors of abuse and regularly issued calls for forgiveness. But while he did the most of any pope to combat the scourge, campaigners say he has never acknowledged what might be the ‘systemic’ causes of abuse within the Church.”
 
In today’s age of authoritarian, strongman leaders around the world, The New Yorker’s Elie touts Francis as the antithesis of that archetype. Politically, Francis sought to move US Catholic churches to the left, for instance indirectly challenging Trump administration immigration policies. (Results were mixed. Francis “was overwhelmingly popular with ordinary Catholics in the United States,” Michael J. O’Loughlin writes for America: The Jesuit Review. “But Francis’ priorities often failed to take root here, and he was unable to move the U.S. church away from culture wars and toward what the late pope called the ‘field hospital’ for the most vulnerable.”)
 
A conservative Catholic and frequent commentator on religion and culture, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observes that by feuding with conservatives in the Church hierarchy, Francis ended the “imperial” papacy. Through that clash, Francis shook the faith in unquestionable papal authority among its most ardent defenders, rearranging Church politics in the process.
 
Douthat writes: “What Francis did, by unraveling the attempted doctrinal settlements of previous popes and unsettling conservatives like me, was add another accelerant to the process [of deterioration in papal authority], bringing us more quickly into a landscape of institutional weakness, even impotence, that we probably would have reached eventually even under more conservative popes. That weakness is bad for the governance of Catholicism … But it has also opened up other possibilities for Christian and Catholic witness. When I look around at the recent stirrings of religious interest in the Western world … what’s notable is how the great culture-war debates of the past 50 years seem to have receded … [T]he manifest weakness of Catholicism as an institution, the breakdown of the lines of authority and deference, has seemingly made it easier for some people to consider Catholicism as a religion, a way of life, and to find their small doorway in.”

Watch Fareed’s Take

President Donald Trump has taken a booming economy and upended it with massive tariff hikes in an attempt to revive US manufacturing. On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed argued this is a backward-looking effort that recalls another from American history: the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, which tried to protect a declining agricultural sector. Trump’s tariffs represent a politics of nostalgia that only hurts Americans, Fareed argued.

The Markets Still

Don’t Like

Trump’s Tariff War

Major US stock-market indices have been up and down since Trump launched his global tariff war this month—nosediving with Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcements, recovering with the suspension of many of those tariffs, and then reaching a shaky resting point below pre-tariff levels. The US dollar, meanwhile, rose on Trump’s election in November but has plummeted below pre-election values against the euro and near those values against the Japanese yen.
 
The Financial Times’ George Steer, William Sandlund and Leo Lewis note, as another contributing factor, Trump’s criticism of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not immediately lowering interest rates to spur economic growth, which economists long predicted Trump’s tariffs would harm. They write: “Monday’s flight from dollar-denominated assets also reflected broader concerns about increasingly volatile US policymaking, [Grey Value Management chief investment officer Steven] Grey said. … Yujiro Goto, forex strategist at Nomura Securities, said the combination of bond sell-offs and currency depreciation at the same time was rare in a major reserve currency market such as the US. Goto attributed the rise in the yen to concerns over US ‘stagflation’ and ‘growing distrust in US asset credibility.’”
 
Have Trump’s policies really made the US less appealing as a place to invest? In his Substack newsletter, economist Paul Krugman argues they have: “What we’re seeing now is something familiar to those of us who have studied economic crises in other countries, usually but not always emerging markets. For this is looking more and more like a ‘sudden stop.’ That’s what happens when a country that has relied on large inflows of foreign capital loses the confidence of international investors. The inflow of money dries up—and the economic consequences are usually ugly. Trump inherited an economy in remarkably good shape. … But Trump wasted no time in squandering the hand he’d been given. It’s not just the destructive tariffs. It’s also the chaos, as policy zigzags wildly, and the craziness. If you were a foreign investor, would you want to bet on America right now? Would you even want to visit to look at investment prospects, given the risk that you might be imprisoned by ICE because you once sent a text critical of Trump?”

Dude, Where’s My Democracy?

Marijuana is now legal for adult recreational use in 24 US states plus the District of Columbia, per the National Council of State Legislatures. Various shades of decriminalization (or strictly medicinal legality) prevail in a handful of other states, but marijuana is only “fully illegal” in four—Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina and Wyoming—according to the employee-screening firm DISA.

At the DC-based think tank New America, Maresa Strano and Mark Schmitt took the unofficial stoner holiday April 20 as an opportunity to reflect on a democratic lesson offered by pot’s path to mostly legal status.
 
State ballot initiatives have featured prominently in marijuana’s legal journey, Strano and Schmitt note: That was the method by which 21 states and DC legalized it. Strano and Schmitt argue US marijuana legalization proves that direct democracy—letting voters make policy directly—is a viable pathway for policies that elected officials resist, for various reasons, despite popular sentiment in their favor.
 
"Critics argue ballot measures can be messy—vulnerable to big money or poorly worded,” they write. “Sometimes they are. But research shows most successful efforts are driven by grassroots coalitions, not corporations. Imperfect laws can be amended. What’s worse is when voters have no path to act at all, especially when normal representative channels are jammed—as are many state legislatures, whose elections are often uncompetitive, prohibitively expensive to enter, and gerrymandered to favor one party."
 
It’s among the most prominent, but legalized pot isn’t the only major state-level policy change to have been made via ballot initiative in recent years, Strano and Schmitt point out: “Voters in Michigan ended partisan gerrymandering by establishing an independent redistricting commission. In South Dakota, Utah, Oklahoma, and four other states citizens expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act after state legislatures refused … In Missouri, they raised the minimum wage and mandated paid sick leave. In 2024, voters in Arizona, Montana, and other states enshrined reproductive rights in their state constitutions—often with more support than the winning statewide candidates on the same ballot.”