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Pope Francis makes historic first US visit

– Anti-American pope? –

The pope arrives in the United States after four days in Cuba, where he said three masses before adoring crowds and met President Raul Castro and his brother Fidel, the men who have ruled the island since its 1959 revolution.

The pontiff, the first from Latin America, played a key role in brokering the recent rapprochement between Washington and Havana, which resulted in the restoration of diplomatic ties in July after more than half a century.

In the United States he will find an American public that widely respects him, but has a less favorable view of the Catholic Church.

While 81 percent of Catholics have a positive view of the Church, only 55 percent of America’s roughly 70 million Catholics as a whole do, according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News earlier this month.

And for some critics, the dominant themes of his papacy — his critique of consumerism, calls to embrace poverty and condemnation of a “throwaway culture” — sound remarkably like an indictment of the American way of life.

That was underlined ahead of his trip when Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, who is Catholic, declared he would boycott the pontiff’s historic address to Congress to protest his “leftist” views.

The pope has been active in urging compassion, including for those historically shunned by the Church, and for calling for action against economic inequality and environmental degradation.

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