Pope Francis died hours after meeting the US vice-president, JD Vance. If that wasn’t a bad enough omen, the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump’s acolyte and self-styled “Christian nationalist”, appeared to welcome the pope’s death as a sign of “evil” being “defeated”.

In fact, despite a series of clashes with the Trump White House, Francis was no liberal. While refraining from judging homosexuality, he explicitly disapproved of the liberalising synodal path embarked on by the Catholic church in Germany, which ruled in 2023 that church employees could not be sacked for entering same-sex relationships or remarrying after divorce. On abortion, euthanasia, women and LGBTQ rights, Francis betrayed the high hopes that liberals and progressives had bestowed upon him.

Liberals also had reason to be critical of the pope’s stance on Ukraine, where Francis appeared to sympathise with Russia’s narrative of the war, suggesting it was caused by, in his words, “Nato barking at the gates of Russia”. This didn’t make Francis unsympathetic to Ukrainian suffering. The pontiff, especially through the efforts of Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, tirelessly sought to mediate over the war’s humanitarian issues, starting with Russia’s alleged abduction of Ukrainian........

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