U.S. Catholics are happier with their church and their pope than they’ve been with either in at least a decade, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that also finds Pope Francis at least as popular with Catholics today as Pope John Paul II was even at his peak in such surveys.
Among Catholics, 92 percent have a favorable view of Francis and 95 percent say the same of the church, a poll released Wednesday finds. Francis’ popularity marks a large increase from former Pope Benedict’s 73 percent favorable rating in a February Post-ABC poll just after he announced his retirement.
The jump in popularity is led by Catholics with moderate and liberal political views.
Ninety-four percent of Catholics who identify as moderate or liberal say they have favorable views of Francis compared with 73 percent who said the same of Pope Benedict after he announced his retirement in February. Among politically conservative Catholics, 91 percent are favorable toward Francis, compared with 84 percent who said the same of Benedict in February.
Francis has triggered a huge wave of interest since taking office in March, swelling crowds at his weekly addresses, generating many millions of social media followers, and becoming the focus of countless articles being written around the globe about his welcoming approach to faith. Tangible effects so far are unclear, however, and one recent survey found no immediate impact in the percent of Americans who say they’re Catholic or who say they attend Mass.
Non-Catholics also voice largely positive views of Francis — 62 percent favorable and 18 percent unfavorable; 21 percent have yet to form an opinion. Benedict drew only 48 percent favorable views among non-Catholics immediately after announcing his resignation in February, while 31 percent saw him unfavorably.
As with Catholics, the jump in papal popularity among non-Catholics is more prominent on the left than the right. Seventy-two percent of non-Catholic liberals see Francis positively, compared with 40 percent who said this of Benedict in February. Similar majorities of conservatives, by contrast, rated Francis and Benedict favorably (59 and 55 percent).
The poll mirrors a February finding that Americans’ overall — Catholic and not — by a 2-to-1 ratio have favorable rather than unfavorable views of the Catholic Church, 62 percent to 30 percent. That is a high-point in the past decade, bringing the favorability of the country’s largest faith group back to the levels it was in the early 2000s, before the clergy sex-abuse crisis hit.
Post-ABC data go back to 1999, when 68 percent of all Americans said they had a favorable view of the Catholic Church. That number fell to a low of 40 percent in December 2002 before climbing back up.
Pope John Paul II, who led the church from 1978 until his death in 2005, had high popularity numbers among Americans. The peak in Post-ABC polling came in the weeks before his death, when 87 percent of U.S. Catholics said they had a favorable view of him. At that time 67 percent of all Americans said the same, compared with 71 percent who said that in early 1998 — his peak by that general yardstick.
When Benedict stepped down, 54 percent of all Americans said they had a favorable view of him, compared with 27 percent who had an unfavorable one and 19 percent who had no opinion. Seventy-six percent of U.S. Catholics had a positive view of him at the time compared with 14 percent who said their view was unfavorable. After a high-profile U.S. visit in 2008, Benedict’s favorability rating peaked at 83 percent, a separate Pew Research Center poll found, a mark similar to where Francis stood in the firm’s polling this fall.
The new poll was conducted last week and included 1,006 randomly selected adults reached on landline and cellular phones. The full survey has a margin of error of 3.5 percent; the margin among Catholics is 7.5 percentage points among the 224 Catholics surveyed.