The Vatican said Francis, the first pope from Latin America, had died after a stroke, and revealed that his will requested a simple tomb in Rome.
The pontiff and the president had little in common. One spurned the traditional red shoes and luxurious apostolic palace for religious simplicity, living humbly in a Vatican City guesthouse. The other made a brand of his own name and wrapped nearly everything he touched, from New York City skyscrapers to the Oval Office, in a gilded sheen. But Pope Francis and President Trump disagreed over far more than style. By the time they met at the Vatican in 2017, the vast differences in their priorities and worldviews were clear. Both rose to global prominence during the same decade of rapid political and societal change, as war, poverty and climate change disrupted nations and sent millions of migrants across the globe. And both leveraged their personal charisma to flex their power in transformative ways, remaking the Catholic church and American politics in their own outsider images. Yet the relationship between the two was defined by the chasm between them, frequently bursting into public view in extraordinary clashes that revealed radically opposing visions of how to lead, and of what kind of world they hoped to create. Until the pope's final day, the two leaders had been tangling over immigration, an issue both saw as crucial to their mission and legacy. Mr. Trump twice won the White House on promises to halt illegal border crossings, blaming undocumented immigrants for crime, economic malaise and terrorism. Pope Francis believed that Christian love required compassionate care for migrants, and that Mr. Trump's agenda of mass deportation violated the "dignity of many men and women, and of entire families." His first papal trip, in 2013, had been to the island of Lampedusa, a Mediterranean gateway to Europe for asylum seekers, to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis he felt the world was ignoring. Image Pope Francis visited the tiny Mediterranean island of Lampedusa in 2013. Credit... Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press During the 2016 election, the…
Jason Horowitz, Emma Bubola, Nina Agrawal, Axel Boada, Natalie Alcoba, Lucía Cholakian Herrera, Daniel Politi, Guerchom Ndebo, Liam Stack, Elisabetta Povoledo, Tyler Pager, Chevaz Clarke, Ruth Graham, Talya Minsberg, Gianni Cipriano, Patricia Mazzei, Lisa Lerer, Elizabeth Dias, Bernhard Warner, Claire Brown, Eric Lee, Aishvarya Kavi, Jim Yardley, Shayla Colon, Robert Chiarito, Somini Sengupta