I apologize that I haven’t offered the most exhaustive research on this topic. In the wake of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigning from office, there have been side debates started that ponder whether the State should legally prohibit prostitution. Naturally, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s controversial opinion that prostitution should be legal has been argued as a Catholic position. From my own reading, this opinion, like his opinion on ensoulment, does not appear to enjoy support from the Church today. Lest anyone be scandalized, the issue of prostitution was widely debated in Aquinas’s time. One side viewed it as a form of human exploitation. Another side, joined by Aquinas, viewed it as a form of fornication. The former view has held up over time.
This view has crystallized starting with Gaudium et Spes, “Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed.”(27) This litany was repeated in Evangelium Vitae and in fact he “repeat[ed] that condemnation in the name of the whole Church.”(3) In Veritas Splendor, John Paul II places prostitution as an intrinsically evil act. Immediately following he writes,
With regard to intrinsically evil acts, and in reference to contraceptive practices whereby the conjugal act is intentionally rendered infertile, Pope Paul VI teaches: “Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (cf. Rom 3:8) — in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general”.
A google search of the Vatican and prostitution will reveal hundreds of documents. While I doubt I will convince everyone with my short exhibition here, I hope it will at least caution people to insert a ‘may’ before their arguments that the Church claims prostitution can be tolerated. I leave with an excerpt from a letter John Paul II wrote to Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran on occasion of a conference on the trafficking of women.
In particular, the sexual exploitation of women and children is a particularly repugnant aspect of this trade, and must be recognized as an intrinsic violation of human dignity and rights. The disturbing tendency to treat prostitution as a business or industry not only contributes to the trade in human beings, but is itself evidence of a growing tendency to detach freedom from the moral law and to reduce the rich mystery of human sexuality to a mere commodity.
For this reason, I am confident that the Conference, while treating the significant political and juridical issues involved in responding to this modern plague, will also explore the profound ethical questions raised by trafficking in human beings. Attention needs to be paid to the deeper causes of the increased “demand” which fuels the market for human slavery and tolerates the human cost which results. A sound approach to the issues involved will lead also to an examination of the lifestyles and models of behaviour, particularly with regard to the image of women, which generate what has become a veritable industry of sexual exploitation in the developed countries. Similarly, in the less developed countries from which most of the victims come, there is a need to develop more effective mechanisms for the prevention of trafficking in persons and the reintegration of its victims
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