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Pew Research released a survey on June 18, and the figure at the heart of it is one most politicians will never see in a lifetime of campaigning: 78 percent of American Catholics view Pope Leo XIV favorably.
That result comes from a poll of 1,848 Catholics conducted between May 26 and June 1. It arrives after weeks in which the president of the United States used the largest megaphone on earth to attack the first American pope by name.
Set Leo’s 78 percent beside the men who have held the Oval Office. The last president to command anything near it was George W. Bush, whose approval reached 90 percent in the weeks after September 11 — the highest figure Gallup has ever recorded. No president has reached that air since. Leo breathes it now, in the middle of a fight the White House picked with him.
The fuller picture lives in the partisan breakdown. Catholic Democrats give Leo an 84 percent favorable rating. Among Republican Catholics, it falls to 72 percent. When Pew first measured opinion of the new pope last August, the two camps stood five points apart; the distance between them has since grown to twelve, more than double in a single year.
Seventy-two percent is no one’s idea of a collapse. Any politician in the country would give almost anything for approval that high, and Leo earns it from Republicans and Democrats alike. The slippage is real, though, and it moves in one direction: the share of Republican Catholics who view Leo unfavorably has climbed from 6 percent last summer to 22 percent today.
What pulled those numbers apart is no secret. In April, Leo spoke against the war the United States was waging in Iran and warned the world about the “delusion of omnipotence” that drives powerful men toward it.
Trump answered on social media, branding the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and insisting that Leo owed his election to Trump sitting in the White House.
Every blow traveled in one direction. Leo returned none of them. He stood on the papal plane and told reporters, “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.” Then he went back to preaching what he had preached before the president ever learned his name.
American Catholics saw clearly who threw the first punch. In the Pew survey, 51 percent say Trump has been too critical of Leo, against just 4 percent who say he has not been critical enough. 70 percent of Catholic Democrats place the blame on Trump. Republican Catholics are split, and a 39 percent plurality actually faults the pope for being too hard on the president, outnumbering the 32 percent who fault Trump.
The faction that actually walked away deserves a closer look. Those 22 percent of Republican Catholics who now see Leo unfavorably did not drift there by accident. Handed a choice between a president and a pope, they picked the president.
The same divide runs through the entire country, not only its Catholics. A national survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, taken in May, found Leo favored by 56 percent of all Americans and Trump by 34 percent.
Trump’s 34 is worth sitting with. It hovers near the floor of his support — the roughly one-in-three Americans who stay with him through everything, the hard core that now openly calls itself MAGA in record numbers. Even at that core, Leo keeps his footing.
Among all Republicans, 47 percent still view him favorably, and only white evangelicals and self-described Christian nationalists pick the president over the pope.
This is the movement that listened to a pope condemn the “inhuman” treatment of immigrants and concluded the pope had lost his way. When Leo pleaded for an end to a war, they called him weak. The Gospel they claim to guard keeps colliding with the politics they have chosen, and politics keeps winning the collision.
None of this puts a dent in Leo’s place in American life. He remains one of the most trusted public figures in the country, holding the affection of people on both sides of a divide that swallows nearly everyone else who steps into it. The community gathering around his papacy keeps growing.
What these numbers expose is something narrower and harder — a committed core that has decided loyalty to Donald Trump outranks fidelity to the Church, and feels comfortable telling a pollster so.
Leo never went looking for this fight. He has met cruelty with the patience the Gospel asks of every one of us, and three-quarters of his own Church, across both parties, have stayed at his side.
We are proud to stand there with them. He is our pope.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the pope who answered insults with the Gospel, and with the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who refuse to trade the dignity of immigrants, the lives of the poor, and the cause of peace for the approval of a president.
In a moment when a loud faction would rather have a strongman than a shepherd, we remain rooted in a faith that will not bow to fear, cruelty, or the idols of power.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country, because people are hungry for something steadier than rage and propaganda. They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in the way we treat the least among us — and that hunger has rarely been more urgent than it is right now.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the politics of cruelty — I am asking you to join us.
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