Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We have ended up with a double

segment for your Monday pod today. My colleague Joe Perticone happened to be in Rome this morning

for his wedding. And so we have a Catholic Rome correspondent

who I spoke to about the death of Pope Francis, our first Jesuit pope, somebody that I feel a little,

even as a lapsed Catholic, a little kindred spirit too, or maybe not kindred spirit, but a little

connection to

Papa Francisco, having been the first Jesuit Pope, someone that has acknowledged the existence

of gay Catholics and, you know, treated them with humanity. It came to, I think, really

recognition washing the feet of AIDS patients in Argentina. So it's a sad loss of Pope Francis. I get into that at greater

length with Joe Perticokeone in segment two. But up first, it's Monday. He's the editor at large of

the bulwark, not a Catholic, famously. It's Bill Crystal. How you doing, Bill? I don't think I'm

famously not a Catholic. I mean, you're pretty famously Jewish, I guess. I'm famously okay with Catholics.

Some of my best friends have been and are Catholics, and some lapsed and some not lapsed.

A lot of converted Catholics in your world, actually.

A lot of people coming in and a lot going out, a lot of movement in the doorway to Catholicism around Bill Crystal.

Maybe worth mentioning, I guess, that the angel of death, our vice president, J.D. Vance, did visit Pope Francis the day before his death?

Yeah, I mean, it is a little striking.

You know, I don't follow the inter-Catholic controversies that much.

I used to be kind of interested in it, but I've sort of lost touch. But he seems to have been a

very decent man. I say as a non-Catholic, looking at it from the outside, he seems to have

been a very decent man in an age that's not very decent in many ways. And in that respect,

I looked up to him, and I think he was an important public figure

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