Trump Tried to Turn America Against Pope Leo XIV. It Didn’t Work.

A new Pew survey gives Leo 84% favorability among Catholic Democrats and 72% among Catholic Republicans — the widest partisan gap of his papacy, more than double a year ago. Where he lost ground, it was the MAGA core choosing the president over the pope.

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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. Here’s the backstory.