RELIGION, CHURCH, INTIMATE CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER EQUALITY (An Analysis of Differences in Gender Equality Policies in European Catholic Countries)

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, samesex 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. ____________ 1 Mieke Verloo has a B.A. in Sociology, an M.A. in Urban Planning, and a Ph.D. in Policy Sciences. She worked for IVA, the Institute for Social Science Research at Tilburg University, for the SCP (as free-lance researcher), for several departments at the University of Nijmegen, and at the University of Utrecht. She worked as staff member for two committees to stimulate women's studies at the national level (VBEO 1980-1982 and STEO 1988-1989). She was Visiting lecturer or Fellow at the University of Hamburg-Harburg and at the IWM, Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna. At the IWM she also was Research Director for MAGEEQ (MAinstreaming GEnder EQuality). Currently, she combines working as Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen with being the Scientific Director of QUING, a 6th Framework Project, at the IWM in Vienna. E-mail: [email protected].