National Political Influence and the Catholic Church Essay -- Politics

Democratic transitions recently became a topic of great discussion among policy-making scholars as a half mask effect of democratization began in Latin America in the mid-seventies and continued through Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. In many of these transitions, the Catholic church service1 play a crucial character as the protector of civil society during periods of communist and right-wing authoritarian rule, as well as taking an active eccentric to promote the psychiatric hospital of democracy (Bruneau 1994, Levine 1980, Stepan and Linz 1996, Perz-Daz 1993, Ramet 1987). While the church buildings political role in transition is important, significantly less scholars have explored how democracy touched the Catholic Church within the national context (Eberts 1998, Ramet 1999, Vilarino and Tizon 1998). Even fewer have attempted cross-national comparisons of the Church, thus permitting generalizations to be made about the political influence of the Church since the instituti on of democratic governance (Casanova 1993, Gill et al.1998).With the make-up of democracy the Church was expected to flourish, due to its organizational and political receipts within new democracies. However, initial research suggests otherwise. Using the involvement of the Church in abortion policy as an indicator of political influence, it is assort the cases of Spain, Brazil and Poland vary extensively. The Polish Church maintained the most political influence, followed by the Brazilian and Spanish Churches (Neilsen 1991, Volenski and Gryzmala-Mosczynska 1997, Gautier 1998, Casanova 1993, Linz 1991, Morris 1993). In Brazil and Poland, the Church played an instrumental role in the democratic revolution, making a political decline in the Church almost inconceivable. While initially th... ...ee is regarded as a non-member state permanent observer allowing it to occasionally participate in General Assembly discussions and decisions and participate in UN International Conferences . Holy See, however, has no voting rights. 3 Secularization refers to the number of clergy that disaffiliated from the Church (i.e. transfer from ecclesiastical to civil).4 Vatican II theology stressed a very different notion of the Church as the people of God, assigned a more important role to the laity, redefined the authority of the Pope over the hole Church and the bishops over the episcopate (Mainwaring 1986). Vatican II theology stressed the need for social justice and vowed to jock the less fortunate, this came to be known as the option for the poor.5 The Roman Curia is the aggregation of ministries for governing the International Church (Della Cava 1993).