Pope Francis’s vast funeral in Rome on Saturday featured a certain amount of politicking amid the splendour, against the magnificent backdrop of St Peter’s basilica.
If the meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump results in progress towards a less inequitable peace than the one currently envisaged by the US, perhaps that will be fitting, given the late pontiff’s consistent calls for an end to war.
But in Washington last week, at the IMF and World Bank, where the architecture is far less glorious, campaigners struggled to find much backing among the powerful for another aspect of Francis’s worldview – his calls to make 2025 a Jubilee year of debt forgiveness for the world’s poorest countries.
A quarter century on…
