The Catholic Church and Transnational Moral Norms in the Philippines

Jonathan T. Chow explores the Roman Catholic Church’s engagement with transnational human rights norms and how its understandings of Catholic identity and doctrine have profoundly shaped the politics surrounding contraception and human trafficking in the Philippines.

In the global politics of morality, the Catholic Church is one of the world’s foremost practitioners, shaping not only the language of transnational moral norms but also how they are implemented at the domestic level. Through “norm thickening”—connecting transnational norms to deeply held local identities and religious teachings and institutionalizing those connections in policies, practices, and organizations—the book argues that the Church can build a more coherent and locally credible moral basis for transnational norms than international consensus alone. While in some cases, this can strengthen transnational norms and facilitate cooperation between the Church and the government, in other cases it can instead harden opposition to those norms and facilitate polarization, with significant consequences for Philippine society. Drawing on field interviews in the Philippines, as well as Vatican and UN documents, Chow paints a compelling picture of how one of the world’s largest religions shapes the global moral landscape.

This book will be of particular interest to students of religion, Catholic theology, human rights, international relations theory, and Asian studies, and anyone seeking to better understand the transnational politics of morality.