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Catholic social teaching and the peripheries: the case for addressing prostitution

Jones, Patricia

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Abstract

Catholic social teaching (CST) has shown little interest in structural and social forces that impact negatively on the dignity and flourishing of women. Such inattention diminishes CST's credibility and neglects its liberative potential. This article examines an area of structural violence against women, the social reality of prostitution, to illuminate the imperative to expand normative CST to address specific experiences of women. Given the inadequacy of the Catechism's treatment of prostitution as an area of personal moral failing, a reading which fails to understand how cultural and legislative structures bear down on women's freedom and agency, a task for CST emerges. When CST principles are brought into dialogue with empirical attention to women's experience of prostitution, the tradition stands in solidarity with those who inhabit an existential and social periphery. The article argues that CST perspectives should nudge the Catholic Church towards proposing an abolitionist ethic in relation to prostitution.

Citation

Jones, P. (2023). Catholic social teaching and the peripheries: the case for addressing prostitution. International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 23(1), 3-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225x.2022.2150459

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 18, 2022
Online Publication Date Dec 9, 2022
Publication Date 2023
Deposit Date Jan 19, 2023
Publicly Available Date May 24, 2023
Journal International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church
Print ISSN 1474-225X
Electronic ISSN 1747-0234
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 23
Issue 1
Pages 3-17
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225x.2022.2150459

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.




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