Pope Francis, who encouraged Catholics to embrace a more compassionate view on many issues but found it difficult to close the book on past abuses by clergy, has died. He was 88.

Francis passed away at 7:35 a.m. Monday in Rome, the Vatican said in a statement. He had been hospitalized in Rome in mid-February with bronchitis, which progressed to pneumonia in both lungs — the last in a litany of respiratory and other medical challenges he had faced. On Sunday, he had met with US Vice President JD Vance. 

The spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics since March 2013, Francis hailed from Argentina, making him the first pope from the Americas, as well as the first Jesuit to hold the position. He became pontiff after the abdication of Benedict XVI and almost immediately reinvigorated Catholicism with his easy demeanor, which was in contrast to his predecessor.

Where Benedict was seen as a guardian of orthodox doctrine, more comfortable with books than crowds, Francis arrived as an often-beaming, humble pope with an expansive message. He captivated many liberal non-Catholics with his focus on poverty and human suffering and called climate change a moral issue that must be addressed. Rejecting the perks and privileges of his position, he shunned the palatial papal apartments in favor of the Vatican guest house.

An early sign of how Francis would approach the papacy came in 2013 when he washed the feet of a dozen prisoners, including young women, at a youth detention center in Rome. That broke the longstanding papal tradition of washing only priests’ feet.

And during his first news conference as pope, when asked about gay men serving as priests — something his predecessor had strictly opposed — Francis answered, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

But faced with a polarized clergy and hidebound Vatican bureaucracy, Francis struggled to live up to initial expectations that he would deal fully with the legacy of widespread child abuse by clergy members.

He abolished the highest level of secrecy long used to protect pedophiles within the church but largely failed to satisfy victims’ demands for accountability. And amid a new wave of allegations of sexual abuse by priests in 2018, Francis faced accusations that he had ignored 2013 warnings about alleged abuse by US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

He did wage a difficult battle to bring more transparency to Vatican finances, and he pushed the Curia, the Vatican’s administration, to listen more attentively to the ideas of far-flung bishops. One other Francis legacy is a reconfigured College of Cardinals, the body that selects the next pope. His changes make it more likely that a candidate from Asia or Africa could be selected.

The secretive process of choosing a new pope was explored in the 2024 film Conclave, in which a cardinal played by Ralph Fiennes oversees an election in the Vatican amid a clash of liberal and conservative candidates.

Accountant’s Son

Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on Dec. 17, 1936, in a working-class Buenos Aires neighborhood, one of five children of immigrants from Italy. His father, Mario, worked as an accountant, and his mother, the former Regina Sivori, was a homemaker.

In his official biography, he said he was influenced by his maternal grandmother, who had defended the church against the rise of fascism and regaled him and his siblings with stories about the lives of saints. She warned him about the excesses of capitalism, teaching him that “burial shrouds don’t have pockets.”

Bergoglio started working in a stocking factory where his father dealt with accounts, and trained as a chemical technician. 

When he was 21, half his right lung had to be removed because of infection. Upon recovery, he entered a seminary and joined the Jesuit order that works within the Catholic Church on behalf of the poor and for social justice.

“I don’t know what happened,” he told an Argentine radio station in 2012. “But I knew I had to become a priest.”

In 1963, he obtained a philosophy degree from the Saint Joseph seminary in San Miguel, Argentina, where he went on to study theology for a second degree.

After his ordination in 1969, and a brief assignment in Spain, Bergoglio returned to Buenos Aires as head of all Jesuits in Argentina and neighboring Uruguay. His tenure coincided with one of the most tumultuous chapters of Argentine history – the “Dirty Wars” of the 1970s, when the military dictatorship waged a brutal campaign against left-wing political opponents.

The Jesuits were divided as well, and Bergoglio angered activists on both the left and right with what he later called his “authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions.” In 1990, the Jesuit leadership in Rome effectively banished him to Cordoba, a city about 400 miles (650 kilometers) from the capital, where he lived simply and interacted regularly with people from all walks of life.

It was “a time of great interior crisis,” he said, and he emerged from his exile with a humbler approach toward leadership. 

Bergoglio was named a bishop in 1992 and leader of Argentina’s largest archdiocese later that decade. In 2001, Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal. Aware that Argentinians were raising funds to travel to Rome to celebrate his appointment, Bergoglio urged them instead to donate that money to the poor. 

He made a similar request in March 2013 when, at 76, he was elected as the 266th pope after Benedict became the first pontiff to resign in almost six centuries.

Since Jesuits are discouraged from becoming bishops — let alone popes — Francis didn’t believe he’d be elected and brought only a small suitcase with him to Rome for the conclave. His selection, in the fifth round of balloting, was viewed as a desire to have an outsider reform the papal bureaucracy. 

Historically, popes have used their choice of a name to signal their defining values. His was a nod to St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar who abandoned family wealth to embrace poverty.

“How I would love a church that is poor, and for the poor,” he said after his election. 

On a 2015 trip to the US, he challenged lawmakers to conquer poverty through a fairer distribution of wealth and, at the United Nations General Assembly, denounced a global economy “guided only by ambition for wealth and power.” 

After he opened an Instagram account in 2016, Francis gained 1 million followers in under 12 hours.

In a surprise 2020 visit to a Vatican conference, he admonished the International Monetary Fund chief and several finance ministers to help alleviate the debt burden of struggling countries, calling for a “new financial architecture” to ensure social justice.

In 2021, the pope became the first leader of the Roman Catholic Church to visit Iraq. Carrying a message of interfaith dialogue, he visited churches that had been wrecked by Islamic State extremists and fulfilled a dream of Pope John Paul II by praying in Ur — the city that, according to tradition, was the birthplace of Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Off the Cuff

Francis’s practice of speaking off the cuff, which won him legions of fans who filled St. Peter’s Square during audiences, got him into hot water twice in 2024. On one occasion, he urged Ukraine to show “the courage of the white flag” and enter negotiations with its invader, Russia. He was quick to clarify his remarks, noting that he condemned all wars.

Months later, Francis apologized after reportedly using an offensive term to refer to gay men wishing to become priests. The incident highlighted the continued fraught relationship between the church and the LGBTQ community, even under his papacy.

On Easter 2024, the pope rallied from months of respiratory problems to preside over Mass in St. Peter’s Square, offering a prayer for peace. He took special note of the plight of civilians in Gaza, while also mentioning Syria, the Rohingya ethnic minority in Myanmar, migrants and victims of human trafficking.

“Let us not yield to the logic of weapons and rearming,” he said. “Peace is never made with arms, but with outstretched hands and open hearts.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Moments after Daniris Espinal walked into her new apartment in Brooklyn, she prayed. In ensuing nights, she would awaken and touch the walls for reassurance — finding in them a relief that turned to tears over her morning coffee.

Those walls were possible through a federal program that pays rent for some 60,000 families and individuals fleeing homelessness or domestic violence. Espinal was fleeing both.

But the program, Emergency Housing Vouchers, is running out of money — and quickly.

Funding is expected to be used up by the end of next year, according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and obtained by The Associated Press. That would leave tens of thousands across the country scrambling to pay their rent.

It would be among the largest one-time losses of rental assistance in the U.S., analysts say, and the ensuing evictions could churn these people — after several years of rebuilding their lives — back onto the street or back into abusive relationships.

“To have it stop would completely upend all the progress that they’ve made,” said Sonya Acosta, policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which researches housing assistance.

“And then you multiply that by 59,000 households,” she said.

The program, launched in 2021 by then-President Joe Biden as part of the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, was allocated $5 billion to help pull people out of homelessness, domestic violence and human trafficking.

People from San Francisco to Dallas to Tallahassee, Florida, were enrolled — among them children, seniors and veterans — with the expectation that funding would last until the end of the decade.

But with the ballooning cost of rent, that $5 billion will end far faster.

Last month, HUD sent letters to groups dispersing the money, advising them to “manage your EHV program with the expectation that no additional funding from HUD will be forthcoming.”

The program’s future rests with Congress, which could decide to add money as it crafts the federal budget. But it’s a relatively expensive prospect at a time when Republicans, who control Congress, are dead set on cutting federal spending to afford tax cuts.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, who championed the program four years ago, is pushing for another $8 billion infusion.

But the organizations lobbying Republican and Democratic lawmakers to reup the funding told the AP they aren’t optimistic. Four GOP lawmakers who oversee the budget negotiations did not respond to AP requests for comment.

“We’ve been told it’s very much going to be an uphill fight,” said Kim Johnson, the public policy manager at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Espinal and her two daughters, aged 4 and 19, are living on one of those vouchers in a three-bedroom apartment with an over $3,000 monthly rent — an amount extremely difficult to cover without the voucher.

Four years ago, Espinal fought her way out of a marriage where her husband controlled her decisions, from seeing her family and friends to leaving the apartment to go shopping.

When she spoke up, her husband said she was wrong, or in the wrong or crazy.

Isolated and in the haze of postpartum depression, she didn’t know what to believe. “Every day, little by little, I started to feel not like myself,” she said. “It felt like my mind wasn’t mine.”

When notices arrived in March 2021 seeking about $12,000 in back rent, it was a shock. Espinal had quit her job at her husband’s urging and he had promised to cover family expenses.

Police reports documenting her husband’s bursts of anger were enough for a judge to give her custody of their daughter in 2022, Espinal said.

But her future was precarious: She was alone, owed thousands of dollars in back rent and had no income to pay it or support her newborn and teenage daughters.

Financial aid to prevent evictions during the pandemic kept Espinal afloat, paying her back rent and keeping the family out of shelters. But it had an expiration date.

Around that time, the Emergency Housing Vouchers program was rolled out, targeting people in Espinal’s situation.

A “leading cause of family homelessness is domestic violence” in New York City, said Gina Cappuccitti, director of housing access and stability services at New Destiny Housing, a nonprofit that has connected 700 domestic violence survivors to the voucher program.

Espinal was one of those 700, and moved into her Brooklyn apartment in 2023.

The relief went beyond finding a secure place to live, she said. “I gained my worth, my sense of peace, and I was able to rebuild my identity.”

Now, she said, she’s putting aside money in case of the worst. Because, “that’s my fear, losing control of everything that I’ve worked so hard for.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• In today’s CEO Daily: Shawn Tully on the U.S.’s use of non-tariff barriers.
• The big story: Musk under pressure to leave DOGE as Tesla becomes tainted with politics.
• The markets: The dollar and the S&P 500 are down but Asia looks OK.
• Analyst notes from Apollo on recession, Oxford Economics on tariffs, and Goldman Sachs on stocks.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. For weeks I’ve been digging into the tariff war reverberating around the globe and affecting virtually every industry there is. To me, a major mystery of the Trump tariff crusade is this: The “Liberation Day” reciprocal duties he’s threatening are completely disconnected from what other nations are charging the U.S. on our exports. In virtually all cases, Trump’s tariffs are multiple times larger. How does he justify this giant gulf? The president claims we’re getting “ripped off” not by excessive tariffs but blatant “non-tariff barriers” (NTBs), such as quotas and technical standards that systematically block our goods from foreign markets, while we naively open America to the “cheaters” who lock us out. But the data show a different story. When I dug in, it became clear that the U.S. is utilizing many of the strategies that we’ve slammed trading partners for enforcing. Here’s what leaders should know about the policies underlying this chaotic debate:

A highly respected guide to where different countries’ trade policies stand on the spectrum from open to restrictive is the International Trade Barrier Index compiled by the Tholos Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank focusing on tax reform and policy research. For 2024, the Tholos data placed the U.S. as the 24th most protectionist economy in the world from a list of 88 countries, based on the number of restraints on trade each nation imposes. Overall, we’re about 10% above average in overall restrictions—on a roster featuring lots of bad actors.

NTBs come in a wide variety of forms. They encompass such practices as quotas, technical standards, and packaging, labeling, licensing, and safety requirements. In a 2024 study, the St. Louis Federal Reserve reported that across 15 manufacturing sectors, NTBs covered well over two-thirds of the imports of components, commodities, and finished products. 

The U.S. is an avid user of a protectionist tool called the “tariff-rate quota.” Despite its name, the TRQ is really a non-tariff barrier because it doesn’t actually impose duties. TRQs typically allow products or commodities to enter the country duty-free to a certain level, and once the imports hit that bogey, trigger prohibitively high tariffs, effectively halting the flows of rival products and commodities from abroad, and enforcing a fixed quota to shield domestic producers. A top example: the sugar market, where, by law, the USDA rules restrict production to keep minimum prices generally higher than on the international markets. “The U.S. government is the leader of a nationwide sugar cartel,” a Cato Institute study declared.You can read the full story about how NTBs work and which industries are the most protected here. — Shawn Tully

More news below.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com