Among German Catholics, the pope’s popularity plummeted by a staggering 20 percentage points in one year, notes analyst Francesco Galietti, who runs the political risk consultancy Policy Sonar, and with Francis at its helm, the Catholic Church as a whole also suffered a drop of 9 percent in its approval rating among the same constituency.
In Italy, as well, support for the Argentine pontiff waned in 2018, Galietti observes, with surveys indicating that the pope’s approval rating fell by five percentage points over the course of the year, from 77 to 72 percent.
Francis’ decreasing popularity in Italy has been offset by growing popularity for the reigning populist, Eurosceptic government, and in particular its most charismatic member, interior minister Matteo Salvini.
While prelates and Church bodies have taken to demonizing Mr. Salvini for his determination to put a stop to Italy’s mass illegal immigration problem, more and more of the Catholic faithful have found themselves more closely aligned with Salvini than with their own shepherds.
One recent poll showed that fewer than one in five Italians (19 percent) would like the government to reopen the country’s closed ports to migrants, while only 12 percent of those surveyed said that it is the responsibility of individual states in whose territorial waters the migrant ships have arrived to resolve the situation. (Read More)
