United States: Pope Francis’ approval rating declines

The popularity rating of Pope Francis in the United States has plummeted in 2015. The Supreme Pontiff had a 59% approval rating in July 2015, as opposed to 76% in February 2014, the Gallup Poll published on July 23 announced. Furthermore 16% of those polled had negative opinions about Francis, as opposed to 9% last year. Thus he has reached again the level of popularity that he enjoyed across the Atlantic right after his election in March 2013 (58%). The favorable ratings diminished the most mainly among citizens who describe themselves as “conservatives”: 45% of this group approval today of Pope Francis’ actions, as opposed to 72% in 2014.

“This decline can be attributed to the Pope’s denunciation of the ‘idolatry of money’ and to the fact that he related climate change partly to human activity, while at the same time he has been obsessed with castigating the gap between rich and poor. These positions go against the beliefs of many conservatives,” explained Art Swift, an expert at the Gallup Institute, quoted by the news agency APIC on July 23. As Béatrice Romée emphasized that same day on the website Reinformation.tv, the question about the origins of global warming is “a much debated topic in the United States”, and probably the Encyclical Laudato sì was “not much appreciated by many climate skeptics, who fight, with scientific evidence supporting them, to prove that man has no responsibility for global warming and that he is not harmful to the environment....”

But Pope Francis has also lost approval ratings in circles that are considered “liberal”, where they have fallen from 82% to 68%. “The reason is,” Béatrice Romée writes, “that the Pope has not changed the Church’s moral teaching on issues of abortion, contraception, and homosexual ‘marriage’. Nor has he considered married priests or the ordination of women.”

Despite everything, the popularity of the Argentine Pope remains higher, in the United States, than that of Benedict XVI, which was around 40% in 2010. Nevertheless it remains weaker than that of John Paul II, who always enjoyed popularity ratings of more than 60%, which peaked at 86% in 1998.

Francis will travel to the United States, via Cuba, on September 19-28.

(Sources: apic/reinformation.tv – DICI no. 319 dated August 7, 2015)

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