(Eagle News) — A recent poll published by CNN, a US news channel, showed Catholic Church’s Pope Francis’s popularity plummeting in the United States among Catholics in that country.
The poll conducted by SSRS showed that only 48 percent of Americans in general supported the Argentinian pontiff, and his popularity has also plummeted by 20 percent among US Catholics, from 83 percent 18 months ago to 63 percent at present.
The CNN poll was conducted from Sept. 6 to 9 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults who were reached through landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer.
“Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points,” a CNN report said.
The CNN poll was conducted amid widespread reports of Catholic clergy abuse of minors in the US and other parts of the world.
The poll showed that there was a “steeper decline” for support for the Catholic pope among women than among men who were interviewed.
-Poll in Italy also showed Catholic pomtiff’s drop in popularity –
Recently, a poll published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica also showed that the Catholic pontiff’s popularity has fallen in five years from 88% to 71%, or since he was elected in 2013 as head of the Roman Catholic Church.
The US Catholic Church has been in upheaval over recent revelations of a massive pedophilia scandal in Pennsylvania involving more than 300 priests said to have abused more than 1,000 children.
Vatican’s former envoy to Washington, Monsignor Carlo Vigano, has already demanded the pope’s resignation, accusing him of covering up for US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
McCarrick was accused of sexually abusing a teenager while working as a priest in New York in the early 1970s.
(Eagle News Service with a report from Agence France Presse)
