Mieke Verloo -
Abstract
During
the past decades, processes of (post)modernization have raised the importance
of quality-of-life issues and related policies, resulting in a higher salience
of intimate citizenship issues on the political agenda. The Catholic Church as
an institution especially has been articulating strong positions on issues
considered to be about personal and family morality, actively opposing
liberalization of abortion or even contraception, assisted reproduction for
non-married couples, and the extension of marriage rights to homosexual people.
This paper will investigate to what extent the framing of a number of intimate
citizenship issues (reproductive rights, abortion, same-sex marriage and
divorce) by the Catholic Church resonates with the framing of these issues in
Catholic countries that are members or candidate to the European Union, and
whether the presence or absence of resonance is linked to the degree of
religiosity of the population, the support for Catholic religious values or to
the institutional strength of the Catholic Church. The analysis will show to
what extent we find ‘Catholic’ frames in the various countries and how that is
connected to the level of religiosity, the support for Catholic religious
values or the institutional strength of the Catholic Church.
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