Jakarta Globe – AFP, March 6, 2014
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| Pope Francis attends, in the Santa Sabina church in Rome on March 5, 2014, the Ash Wednesday mass, opening Lent, the forty-day period of abstinence and deprivation for Christians, before Holy Week and Easter. (AFP Photo) |
Washington.
A year after being chosen Pope Francis is very popular with American Catholics
though his handling of the pedophile priests’ scandal left many underwhelmed, a
new study found.
More than
eight in 10 surveyed in the Pew Research Center study of 1,821 adults 18 or
older — fully 85 percent — had a favorable opinion of the pope a year after his
elevation, it found.
Francis,
born in Argentina, is the first pope born in the Americas, and the first from
Latin America.
While a
strong majority approves of Francis’ work on behalf of the poor and
disenfranchised, the new pope earned lower marks for his handling of the sex
abuse crisis, the study found.
“Fifty-four
percent of Catholics giving him an excellent or good rating for his handling of
the issue. One year ago, 70% of US Catholics said that addressing the sex abuse
scandal should be ‘a top priority’ for the new pope, far more than said the
same about standing up for traditional moral values, spreading the Catholic
faith or other issues,” the study stressed.
Francis has
defended the Catholic Church’s record on tackling the sexual abuse of children
by priests, saying “no one else has done more” to root out pedophilia.
The
comments, in an interview published Wednesday, were the pope’s first response to
a scathing UN report that denounced the Vatican for failing to stamp out child
abuse and allowing systematic cover-ups.
“The
Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with
transparency and responsibility. No one else has done more. Yet the Church is
the only one to have been attacked,” he said in an interview with Il Corriere
della Sera daily.
Last
month’s hard-hitting UN report called on the Church to remove clergy suspected
of raping or molesting children.
It accused
the Vatican of systematically placing the “preservation of the reputation of
the Church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims.”
On issues
involving church traditions and social change, US Catholics, a minority in a
sea of Protestants, are more progressive as a whole on issues of social change
than their counterparts in most majority Catholic countries.
The United
States is mostly Christian and Catholics are the largest single Christian
group. But US Protestant Christian denominations together outnumber Catholics,
and many sociologists believe they heavily influence what US Catholics see as
normal.
Unlike in
many majority Catholic cultures, US Catholics believe overwhelmingly that their
church should not oppose birth control (77%); should and will allow priests to
marry (72%); and should and will allow women to become priests (68%), the
survey found.
Half of
American Catolics said their church should recognize marriages of gays and
lesbians, it found.
Agence France-Presse
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