Good morning. It is April 22nd. It is a cloudy and coolish morning in New York City, but not for long, according to the forecast, as we're heading for a sunny and very warm day. Time to once again switch from the jeans to the shorts, unless you're fortunate enough to still have an officewear type job, in which case wear lightweight trousers and enjoy your 401k.

And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The government denied a furlough to Mahmoud Khalil for the birth of his child, keeping him in detention in Louisiana as his wife went through labor and delivery in New York City. Again, still, this is the punishment that the federal government is inflicting on him for supporting protests against Israel's mass slaughter in Gaza as it continues to try to deport him for exercising foundational First Amendment rights. 

The front of this morning's New York Times is dominated by Pope Francis, whose death gets a full-width headline, “GROUNDBREAKING POPE RESHAPED THE CHURCH,” and everything else above the fold, on the way to four full pages worth of obituary on the inside of the paper, plus another full page of retrospective, and one more full page explaining and handicapping the process of finding the next pope. The obituary by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley starts off under the subheadline “Pushed Inclusion and Advocacy, Not Dogma,” which is how the Times's ham-fisted story packagers deal with a non-reactionary humane focus on the teachings of Jesus Christ rather than the authoritarian majesty of the institutional church.

“He became,” the Times writes, “the first Pontiff to take his papal name from St. Francis of Assisi, the austere friar who dedicated his life to piety and the poor, and who, according to tradition, received instruction from God to rebuild his church. Francis signaled his humble style from the outset. He paid his own bill at the Vatican Hotel, where he stayed during the conclave that elected him, wrote about town in a modest Ford Focus, lived in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate papal apartments, and in a holy week ritual performed at a youth prison washed the feet of a young Muslim woman. Later in his ailing years, he referred to his own frailty in demanding dignity for the aged.” The obituary goes on to say, “Francis took over the church at a moment of crisis. In the industrialized world, it suffered from falling attendance, faith draining clerical sexual abuse scandals, demands for a greater role for women and a dire shortage of priests. And in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where the faith was continuing to grow, the Catholic Church faced increasing competition from Protestant, evangelical, and Pentecostal churches. He soon tried to move the church away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality and shifted its emphasis to global problems like climate change, poverty, and migration. His first papal trip out of Rome was to Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island that had become the point of arrival for thousands of African migrants crossing the Mediterranean.” This is how Americans talk about religion and politics, but it's striking to see the premise laid out in print that climate change, poverty, and migration fall into a category of less divisive issues than abortion and homosexuality. As our own domestic fascist movement, in alliance with fascist movements throughout Europe, organizes itself around the abuse, ejection, and exclusion of migrants, under the leadership of Donald Trump, who, the obituary notes, Francis suggested was not Christian because of his preference for building walls rather than bridges. Specifically going back to the clips from 2016 what NPR reported was that on the subject of Trump's plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico, Francis said “I just say that this man is not Christian, if he said it in this way. A person who thinks only about building walls wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian.

Trump responded at the time by fantasizing about the Vatican being sacked by ISIS, because paranoid xenophobia is the essence of his political movement. 

And the subject of Francis's relations with our homegrown fascist tendency takes up the other lead column on page one. Under the sub headline, “Shifts Split Faith in U.S., Fueling Right’s Fire.” As always, the Times packages the right as the true actors in any situation. Even though the story opens after a quick acknowledgement of how the Catholic Church in America was deeply aligned with the religious right in fierce conflicts over issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception with a positive account of Pope Francis's alternative vision of Catholic teachings, challenging the church and the nation, the Times writes, “each to shift its moral focus toward issues like poverty, immigration and war, and to confront the realities of income inequality and climate change.” The story goes on to say, “he gave voice to the growing share of Hispanic Catholics as the American church grew less white and appointed the first African American cardinal. He allowed priests to bless same sex couples and made it easier for divorced and remarried Catholics to participate in church life. In doing so, he captured the imaginations of millions both inside and outside the American church who had long felt rejected. At a time of increasing secularization, the world's most visible Christian leader gave hope to many U.S. non-Catholics who saw in him a moral visionary while much of public Christianity in America took a rightward turn.” 

Only after that does the story get to the people who really matter. “Yet it was this same transformative vision that ultimately fueled the rise of an energized conservative Catholic resistance which further divided the church in America. Pope Francis's cardinals had a minority voice among U.S. bishops and in the final years of his papacy, powerful conservative lay Catholics once again made ending abortion their dominant priority. Conservative Catholic backlash to values like Pope Francis's helped return President Trump to the White House with Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert by his side, advancing priorities that conflicted with Pope Francis’s.” Not false, although it's probably worth noting that the seat of that conservative Catholic backlash was less in the American masses and more specifically in the Supreme Court, an overwhelmingly Catholic institution whose Catholic members are overwhelmingly far-right extremists, installed through a largely Catholic far-right conspiracy to remake the judiciary, and whose jurisprudence led them to protect Donald Trump from criminal liability and constitutional ineligibility under the Insurrection Clause to reclaim the presidency after he tried to steal it. 

The framing of Francis as a liberal also overstates the congruence between this incense-centered fascist movement and the actual teachings of the previous popes. Nowhere in the piece about the interplay between Catholic teaching and right-wing U.S. politics do the words “death penalty” appear, even though aggressively Catholic-branded figures like former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr went all out to use the power of the state to kill as many people as they could, in defiance of the teachings of all the popes, not just this bleeding heart from Argentina. 

The story does put all of this into some perspective by noting “the United States itself was not Pope Francis's main priority. He visited the country only once in 2015 and he intentionally arrived from Cuba. One more way to show his global priorities. 

Elsewhere on page one, below the fold, on the right hand side, the president is standing by Pete Hegseth. “President Calls Chat Concerns ‘Waste of Time,’” is is the followup to yesterday's news about a second insecure chat in which the secretary of defense discussed sensitive attack plans. 

The other two stories on the page form a nice little pairing. One is “Would $5,000 Bonuses Spur New Baby Boom? Trump Aides Weighing
Rewards for Births,” and next to that, “E.P.A. Poised to Cancel Grants
To Study Dangers to Children.”  This is what we call in evolutionary biology, an r-strategy. Spawn as many as possible, like oysters, let them die, and hope enough of them make it through. 

On page A22, down at the bottom, “Trump raised $239 million for inauguration, a record.” 

“Inaugurations,” the Times writes, “even with several days of elaborate dinners and other events, have never cost anything near roughly a quarter-billion dollars, and the amount raised by the committee will resurface questions about where any leftover funds might go. The committee has not said how much money it has spent, but the president’s allies have said that the remaining amount will be funneled to other Trump-sponsored projects, primarily a nonprofit organization that will build his presidential library.”

That's the same presidential library fund that's a catch basin for all the other kinds of bribes he's shaken out of people like his various bogus settlements with news organizations. Anyway, this is a story that would have brought down every other presidency in American history, but it's hard to disagree in context with where it ended up in the paper. 

Above it, the news is “Harvard sues over threats to block funding.”

“Harvard,” The Times writes, “the world's wealthiest university, sued the Trump administration on Monday, fighting back against its threats to slash billions of dollars from the school's research funding as part of a crusade against the nation's top colleges. The lawsuit signaled a major escalation of the continuing fight between higher education and President Trump, who has vowed to reclaim elite universities. The administration has cast its campaign as a fight against anti-Semitism, but has also targeted programs and teaching related to racial diversity and gender issues.”

It's good that Harvard's filing the lawsuit, but “escalation” doesn't really seem like the right term. The choice is either to let the Trump administration arbitrarily and capriciously and illegally take the money, or to not let them. And once you've decided the answer is not to, then taking it to the courts is just the natural next step. Anyway, in a marker of how long the battle between Harvard and the administration has already stretched out, the photo on the story is not the picturesque domed spires of Elliott or Dunster houses, nor the majestic steps and pillars of Widener Library, but the low-slung, utilitarian modern glass front of Lamont Library. They're going to be shooting pictures of Canaday before this is all over. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.