By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
A new Pew poll found Catholics to be deeply divided Barack Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame later this month. It also found that disapproval of the President’s job performance has almost doubled among practicing Catholics in the last two months.
The poll, conducted from April 23-27, 2009, among 2,003 adults, revealed that most Catholics who have heard about the issue support the University of Notre Dame’s decision to invite Obama to speak and receive an honorary degree at their May 17 commencement, even though he supports legal abortion and embryonic stem cell research.
However, among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, those who attend Mass at least once a week express much higher levels of disapproval of the visit. Among weekly attending white Catholics, 45 percent say it was wrong for Notre Dame to invite Obama, while 56 percent of less-observant Catholics take the opposite point of view.
A similar split appears between more-observant and less-observant Catholics in assessing Obama’s job performance as president.
While the most recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that two-thirds of Catholics say they approve of Obama’s performance, the same poll shows that weekly attending white Catholics are now noticeably more negative toward Obama compared with earlier this year. In fact, a plurality of this group (45%) now disapproves of the job Obama is doing. These negative numbers have more than doubled in recent months, up from 20 percent in February.
The People-Press poll also shows that the balance of Catholic opinion leans in support of both abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research, even though recent polling suggests that, as with the public overall, Catholics’ views on abortion have moved in a more conservative direction over the past year. However, the Catholic community remains deeply divided on these issues depending on frequency of Mass attendance.
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