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ing abortions. Further, the Catholic Church drew upon the fact that abortion was immoral, and thus both the Catholic Church and many physicians argued that the health of the woman was put at risk (Oliver, 2008, p. 223). However, as awareness regarding abortions grew and as time went on, there were changing attitudes towards abortion. For instance, doctors claimed that they should be the only ones to carry out abortions (although they were the same doctors that felt it was morally wrong), and the American Medical Association began to hold the reigns of the issues of abortion more so than the Catholic Church. Thus, since the topic of abortion is a social justice issue in which Catholic views on the issues have been changing as opposed to stagnant, this supports the thesis that Catholic standpoints are becoming less stringent than they were previously.

The other issue related to the social justice topic of abortion is the topic of justice in and of itself. Justice in the Catholic faith brings in another perspective. From the Catholic standpoint, justice is based on the word of God, the teaching of Jesus Christ, and the Traditions of the Roman Catholic Church (Oliver, 2008, p. 4). Moreover, in American penal organizations, Post-revolutionary Catholicism favoured a democratic model of authority, local autonomy, and the separation of the Church and the state (Stotnicki, 2013, p. 83). In other words, a congregational pattern of church polity was regarded as the most acceptable model of the prison system (Stotnick, 2013, p. 83). Thus, this points to a symbiotic relationship between Catholicism and the criminal justice system in which Catholicism worked hand-in-hand with social justice, and in some cases, removing signs of religion from within the system to maintain the justice system’s autonomy. However, in 1973 an event in New York changed the landscape in which Catholic teachings would be allowed in the penal system. For instance, in 1973, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) published a Reform paper on Correctional Institutions in the 70s and claimed that certain practices they were proponents of, decreased recidivism rates, while results showed the opposite-that recidivism rates increased with such practices (Stotnicki, 2013, p. 84).

The other issues with the paper were that the paper called for rehabilitation without defining what it meant by the term and what goals would be accomplished (Ibid., p. 84). Lastly, the paper called for alternatives to prison, without giving examples of such alternatives (Ibid., p. 84). Furthermore, Stotnicki (2013) argues that the concept of deterrence does not fit in with the Catholic religion. Thus, this could point to delineation where the Catholic tradition had less of an impact on the penal system than it did in previous decades. A principle component of Catholicism and the criminal justice system is that incapacitation should be used to reshape the beneficent values of a market economy on a case-by-case basis (Stotnicki, 2013).

What is interesting about trends in social justice and Catholicism is that in a Gallup poll conducted in 2004, 71% of Protestants and 66% of Catholics support the use of capital punishment (Stotnicki, 2012). Although this poll was taken over 10 years ago, what is interesting is that capital punishment is not in line with the New Testament - although arguably, it is an Old Testament principle; this is fodder against the argument