Catholicism’s Favor in the United States

Two new polls on Catholicism’s favor in the United States have just been released, presenting mixed results. The first, conducted by ABC News and The Washington Post , finds that unfavorable views of the Catholic Church have risen by an astonishing 25 percentage points among Americans since February. Whether that’s a bad statistic or an accurate measure of the nation’s unique religious fickleness, it’s hard to cast in a positive light. In the calm after this year’s Long Lent, the study also finds that 76 percent of all Americans disapprove of the way instances of sexual abuse were dealt with in past decades. Given that prompt’s aim to assess episcopal response—not the subjective culpability of bishops who caused scandal—one might expect the figure to be higher, with most bishops finding themselves within the 76 percent. As for practicing Catholics, “as would be expected,” ABC’s Dalia Sussman unironically notes, “views of the church are most positive among regular churchgoing Catholics,” 82 percent of whom have a favorable disposition towards the Church.

A poll conducted by CBS News and The New York Times found, similarly, that 77 percent of practicing Catholics say the most recent reports on Vatican politics have no bearing on how they “feel about the Catholic Church” and nearly all Catholics (86 percent) reported that leaving the Church over sex abuse scandals was out of the question. Overall, practicing Catholics appear to align with the Church’s outlook, while lapsed Catholics—a group given significant weight by the CBS/ Times pollsters—align themselves more closely with non-Catholic Americans in their views on the Church. One particularly concerning finding was that Pope Benedict’s ‘approval rating’ (no, he’s not a politician) has fluctuated by as much as 16 points in the space of a month. It’s as if the Catholics polled have had two fingers on the pulse of the New York Times , eager to believe the worst, even when sensation obscured doubtful evidence. Worse, the trend among Americans to view the pope as a spiritual politicker is only reinforced by the poll’s entirely unnuanced view towards the non-political purpose of Church leadership. Though 62 percent of practicing Catholics have a favorable disposition towards the episcopacy, the news media, alas, still seems unwilling to view the Church through anything but a political lens.