Pope Francis’s first-ever visit to the United States — which began on Tuesday and includes stops in Washington DC, New York City, and Philadelphia — has generated immense excitement. Revelers thronged the National Mall to witness the pontiff wave from the iconic popemobile. Inside Madison Square Garden, he delivered an inter-faith mass before twenty thousand worshippers. Philadelphia expects its population to double for his open-air mass tomorrow on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The visit of any pope occasions an outpouring of enthusiasm. But Francis, a septuagenarian Argentinian formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has grown enormously popular since his tenure began in 2013 — especially among liberal Catholics. His comparatively inclusive rhetoric has made a troubled, authoritarian institution — long held back by its antediluvian views on sexuality and chronic failure to police endemic sexual abuse internally — seem a bit more benevolent.

His encyclical this year acknowledged the reality of climate change and called for unified action from world governments. He also decried unfettered capitalism in terms that, if analyzed through rose-tinted glasses, almost appeared socialist. Unregulated global capital, according to the pope, is a