What’s left when the market crashes?

The hope that faces the worst and still stands.

Callum Elwood

Callum is a pastor, based on a barge, in London's Docklands.

Mapping the market.

One moment your firm feels steady. The next, a surprise resignation, a regulatory shift, or a market panic sends everything spiralling. We live in volatile times, economically, politically, personally. One day it’s a routine check up, the next it’s a diagnosis. One day life as normal, the next life no more. So how do we keep going when things go wrong? And what kind of hope holds when everything collapses?

Good Friday, the day Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus, might seem like an unlikely place to look. After all, it’s about public failure: betrayal, injustice, humiliation, death. Jesus, declared innocent by both Roman and Jewish authorities, was still executed as a criminal. If anyone looked like a failed investment, it was him.

And yet, that moment of collapse is also where Christians find their deepest hope.

As Jesus hung on the cross, mocked by crowds and soldiers alike, one criminal beside him suddenly saw things differently. “This man has done nothing wrong,” he said. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” It’s a staggering claim—that even in death, Jesus holds authority over life. Somehow an innocent Jesus thinks his death has significance for a guilty criminal.

Two signs in that story point to something bigger. First, darkness covered the land in the middle of the day—a sign of judgement, echoing an ancient prophecy. Second, the curtain in the temple tore in two—symbolising that the barrier between God and people had been removed. In his death, Jesus was taking on the cost of wrongdoing, so that humanity could be brought back to God.

This isn’t optimism. It’s not distraction. It’s a hope that faces the worst and still stands.

Markets run on confidence. We weigh risk, scan for signals, try to act wisely. But confidence—con fide—literally means “with faith.” The Christian claim is that Jesus is worth that faith. Not because he keeps us safe from all harm, but because even in death, he has gone ahead of us and made a way through.

So the question is: when everything goes wrong, where will your confidence be?

Snippet

Belief

Creed

Leading

21 April 2025

2 min read

Pope Francis leaves a complex world

He was loved for all the same reasons he was ardently criticised.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

The Pope kisses a foot he has just washed.

Pope Francis kisses the foot of a woman inmate of the Rebibbia prison.

The Holy See.

The Holy Father, Pope Francis, died this morning, at the age of 88. Fittingly, he went to life after witnessing one last Easter fire. He had seemingly half-recovered from a month of hospitalisation due to pneumonia, and even blessed the crowds gathered at St Peter’s Square yesterday from the balcony. May he rest in peace.

He was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, in 1936, to two Italian immigrants seeking a life away from Mussolini’s fascist rule. Sadly, this would not spare their son from dictatorships - in the 1970s, Argentina’s government was seized by a military junta, violently opposed to socialism.

But this bit of biography is vital for understanding the nuanced figure of Pope Francis.

In 1958 he entered the Society of Jesus, a religious order founded with half an eye on responding to the Protestant Reformation. Their origins in apologetics and counter-dialogue have given the ‘Jesuits’ a reputation for softness on doctrine. Choosing the papal name ‘Francis’ when he was elected on 13th March 2013, some saw an indication that this Pope was a reformer.

Many painted Francis with this brush during his pontificate, and with reasonable cause. In 2021, the Pope restricted the use of the Traditional Latin Mass, a move which gravely offended communities who regretted the move to vernacular language services in the 1960s. In 2023, he confirmed that priests may bless people in “irregular unions”, such as same-sex and remarried couples, though not as a blessing of the union. He has been seen as a wind of change - open-hearted, popular, and genuinely humble in his servant leadership.

But during his time as the head of the Argentinian Jesuits, the young Fr Bergoglio was outwardly a conservative, opposed to the left-aligned Liberation Theology that swept through the Latin American conferences and seminaries of the era. As Pope, he could be as gruff and traditional as they come. His answer to an interviewer's question about whether women can be admitted to Holy Orders in 2024 began with a blunt “no”. He found himself in hot water when using negative slur for gay people in a frank talk about the atmosphere of some Catholic seminaries.

Too liberal for the trads, and too traditional for the libs. Who was Pope Francis? What I think he learnt from the military takeover of the 1970s was the cost of idealism, at either end of the political spectrum. He was, it seems to me, a pragmatist. Not an academic like his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and, unlike Pope St John Paul II, there was no clear-cut political object in the form of the dissolving USSR. Francis was Pope within a far more complex world, increasingly lacking a clear moral bedrock, and finding it increasingly hard to respond to massive technological and social change.

Francis will be known for his attempts to strike balances in all of it - to plead for change, but stay closed elsewhere. He was loved for all the same reasons he was ardently criticised. Such is our polarised time. As a Catholic, I happily do not have to worry all that much about whether his successor will follow, or depart, from his mould. With a conclave imminent, it is the Holy Spirit’s work now.