She said of Francis, “I would say I was still dating him but hesitant, and this summer I broke up with him for sure.”

The Pew survey confirms that American Catholics are polarized over Francis along political lines — a stark contrast from 2014, one year into his papacy, when Catholic Democrats and Republicans were virtually aligned in their positive opinions on him. About nine in 10 rated him favorably, no matter their political affiliations.

Now Catholics who are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party are far more likely to have a favorable opinion of Francis than Catholics who are Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party, 83 percent compared with 61 percent, the new poll shows.

(The poll was conducted from Sept. 18 to 21 among 1,754 adults, including 336 Catholics. The margin of error is 2.7 percentage points for the pool of all adults, and 6.2 percent for the Catholic subgroup.)

The poll results are a far cry from Francis’ first years as pope, when he won the hearts of Catholics worldwide, whatever their political leanings, with his emphasis on love, mercy and compassion for vulnerable people. He won praise for teaching by example, cradling to his chest a badly disfigured man at a public audience in St. Peter’s Square.

News cameras followed as he hosted lunch for the homeless, and bent down to wash the feet of prisoners in the Holy Thursday ritual. His folksy tweets, on a range of topics from marriage to environmentalism, were retweeted eight times more frequently than those of President Barack Obama. In Italy, a celebrity gossip magazine publisher launched a weekly “My Pope” fanzine to dispense the pope’s advice and photographs.

His popularity in the United States soared after he visited in 2015, when he praised Martin Luther King III in an address to Congress and embraced an immigrant girl who broke through security barriers to reach his popemobile.