The involvement of the Portuguese Catholic Church in the debate of morality issues: a comparative analysis of the issues of euthanasia and gender identity

Although Portugal still has a significant level of religiosity and the results of the European Values Study of 2017 still reveal a considerable level of societal conservatism, the country has been under a recent legal "permissiveness wave" regarding morality issues, that is, issues whose debate often involves the use of moral, ethical and religious arguments, such as euthanasia, abortion, LGBTI+ rights, prostitution, or drug use. This is particularly true in countries of the so-called ‘religious world’, such as Portugal, where a secular-religious party cleavage exists. Two such issues are active euthanasia and self-determination of gender identity, which started to be discussed in 2016 and were approved in the following years, raising a huge political debate and social controversy. One element that is characteristic of the debate of this type of policy issues is the involvement of several stakeholders beyond the usual political actors, namely societal actors, which may be conceived as ‘interest groups’. An often-active actor in the debate of morality policies in the so-called ‘religious world’ is church-related actors, particularly when there is no admittedly confessional political party with seats in Parliament, which happened in Portugal until 2019. Taking this context into consideration, this paper contributes to the discussion about the participation of the Portuguese Catholic Church in the debate about morality issues in Portugal, which is still underexplored in the literature. More specifically, it aims to understand the involvement of the Catholic Church during the agenda-setting and formulation stages, namely through lobbying/advocacy strategies with political parties and/or public opinion, specifically through the official Catholic Church media agency (Eclesia); and the opinion articles written by church-related actors during this period in two Portuguese newspapers (one more politically associated to the right-wing and another to the centre), for which we developed a qualitative analysis, by analyzing the position and argumentation used by these actors. The results allowed us to conclude that religious actors, particularly those related to the Portuguese Catholic Church, were much more active in the euthanasia debate, leaving the gender self-determination debate aside, but even in the debate on euthanasia this strategy diminished as the debate progressed, possibly justified by the public scandals about paedophilia to which the church was associated. Nevertheless, we observed that this strategy was facilitated due to the religious party cleavage that is still latent in Portugal, which led secular political parties and social actors to be more involved in these issues as a political strategy against confessional/ conservative political parties.