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.

When the context rows against. Voicing parents of transgender children and teenagers in Italy: A qualitative study

“…Moreover, the Catholic tradition, which rejects homosexuality, is strongly present in the country (Tausch, 2017), as the recent parliamentary debate on adopting a law against homobitransphobic crimes demonstrated. In fact, the current COVID‐19 emergency has been used as an excuse, especially by right‐wing parties, to say that this law cannot be a priority at this time for the country (Accolla, 2020).…”