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The sexual abuse scandal has undermined Pope Francis’ once-soaring popularity in the United States, with a poll released on Tuesday showing that support for the religious leader has dropped precipitously among Americans.
A new Pew poll shows that only 51 percent of Americans now rate him favorably, a fall of 19 percentage points since January 2017.
Francis has retained the support of seven in 10 American Catholics, but that has dropped from about eight in 10 since January of this year, when the sexual abuse scandal re-emerged as an international crisis for the Roman Catholic Church.
Since January, Francis has been forced to dismiss bishops in Chile accused of covering up abuse, and has himself been accused by a former Vatican diplomat of failing to discipline an abusive American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington. A shocking grand jury report in Pennsylvania released in August compounded the alarm.
Now only 31 percent of American Catholics rate Francis’ handling of the scandal as good or excellent, down from 54 percent in February 2014, about one year into his papacy, according to the survey, by the Pew Research Center.
Francis has strongly condemned child sexual abuse and called a worldwide meeting of bishops in February to address abuse in the church. But he has refused to respond to the allegation that he himself was negligent in handling then-Cardinal McCarrick, which has proved upsetting to many American Catholics.
It’s a far cry from Francis’ first years as pope, when he won the hearts of Catholics and non-Catholics worldwide with his emphasis on love, mercy and compassion for vulnerable people. He won praise for teaching by example, cradling to his chest a badly disfigured man at a public audience in St. Peter’s Square.
News cameras followed as he hosted lunch for the homeless, and bent down to wash the feet of prisoners in the Holy Thursday ritual. His folksy tweets, on everything from marriage to environmentalism, were retweeted eight times more frequently than those of President Barack Obama. In Italy, a celebrity gossip magazine publisher launched a weekly “My Pope” fanzine to dispense the pope’s advice and photographs.
His popularity in the United States grew after he visited in 2015, where he praised Martin Luther King III in an address to Congress and embraced an immigrant girl who broke through security barriers to reach his popemobile.
