Practicing Catholics and Their Attitudes on Homosexuality. Comparative Analyses, Based on Recent World Values Survey Data

Abstract

Growing international sociological evidence seems to suggest that more and more Roman Catholic faithful do not follow anymore the condemnation of the homosexual act as a “deadly sin”, voiced by the official current Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. In simple terms, the question in our essay is primarily whether the rejection of homosexuality still enjoys the support of the rank and file of the global Catholic faithful, and secondly, whether practicing Catholics (weekly Church attenders, “Dominicantes”) are more tolerant than the societies surrounding them in accepting homosexuality and in accepting homosexual neighbors.

Our work, based on data from the “World Values Survey”, which is a kind of global representative opinion barometer, now available for almost 90% of humanity, initiated by the University of Michigan and satisfying high international standards of comparative opinion surveys, shows that the Vatican teaching on homosexuality – i.e. rejecting the homosexual act, but not discriminating against the homosexual person – is still most followed by the Dominicantes in Viet Nam, Italy, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and Brazil. Most notably, the Dominicantes in Slovakia, France, Bosnia, Zambia, and Nigeria are at the bottom of our list of meeting these double requirements of the Vatican’s teaching on homosexuality.

In comparison to overall society, practicing Roman Catholics in Switzerland, Spain, Hungary, Italy, and Uruguay especially strongly rejected homosexuality, while practicing Roman Catholics in the multicultural environment of South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Nigeria, and in the Latin American country Guatemala were the record holders of accepting homosexuality compared to the society around them.

It is sufficiently clear that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality has less and less followers, and that in the light of the close relationships of homosexuality acceptancy indicators with those of support for a democratic Open Society, discussed at length in the article, a rethinking of the entire issue would be advisable, if the Roman Catholic Church would like to continue to claim to be pillar of a democratic civil society.

Keywords: Keywords: homosexuality, homophobia, human rights, religion, discrimination

JEL Classification: A13, B54, D63, J1, J12, J14, J15, J16, K14, K33, K4, M14, O51, O52, O53, O54, O55, O56, O57