Religion and Women’s Rights: The Fundamentalist Face of Catholicism in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter reflects my personal experience as a feminist and a Catholic woman of the Brazilian Church. In this chapter, I ana- lyze the difficulty that Roman Catholicism (Catholicism) has in accepting the modern notion of individual autonomy—which underlies the concept of human rights—particularly with respect to women. This difficulty is at the foundation of the conflict between human rights for women as conceived in liberal theory and Catholicism. I also explore how Latin American women have reformulated human rights for women so that they are integrated into the context of collective rights, and include, inter alia, social rights and reproductive rights. These visions of women’s rights conflict with Catholicism, a conflict that has been particularly evi- dent in Brazil. This chapter ends with examples of the Brazilian Church engaging in Catholic fundamentalist political action that has been aimed at making Brazil’s laws correspond to traditional Catholic doctrine con- cerning sexuality.