Now it’s time to pivot from primary politics to papal coverage, as Pope Francis prepares to take the Acela Corridor by storm. My colleague Laurie Goodstein has an overview of the state of American Catholicism — declining in the north and east, growing in the south and west, increasingly Hispanic and consistently divided — that includes these polling nuggets on how Francis has changed American Catholic attitudes toward the church without necessarily changing their involvement with the institution:
Two and a half years into his papacy, Francis is already much beloved. A new poll by The New York Times and CBS News shows that Francis is arriving in the United States on a wave of good will among American Catholics: 63 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of him, far above the 43 percent peak for his predecessor, the retired Benedict XVI, and nearly in line with the high mark for John Paul II in 2002, when 69 percent of Catholics said they viewed him favorably.
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