Is also why there are so many converts from Catholicism to New age sorts of Christian churches.
Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.
Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.
The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.
He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.
I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.
Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.
But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.
I'm not convinced that every Catholic you know constitutes a representative sample of Catholics worldwide.
It does make the news. This is something we should be aware of. Here's just one such story: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-francis-samesex-bles..., not to mention the recent spats from VPOTUS.