2025-12-31
22 分钟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 obituaries editor, Anne Rowe,
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.