Czech bishop calls for legal prostitution

The bishop believes legalising prostitution is a lesser evil

By Robert Pigott The BBC's religious affairs correspondent

The Roman Catholic bishop of Prague has called for prostitution to be made legal, warning that the sex trade is invading the country and causing a crisis in moral values.

Bishop Vaclav Maly said it was no longer enough to moralise about prostitution.

It isn't enough simply to moralise, to judge, but it is necessary to do something

Bishop Vaclav Maly

What gives the bishop's apparent challenge to Roman Catholic orthodoxy its significance is the support he has won among other Czech bishops.

Out on the streets of Prague, Helena, 52 and a grandmother, makes her living. She looks like a respectable middle aged office worker until she changes her cotton trousers for a short black lycra skirt.

After a throat swab test for HIV, she takes a night's supply of condoms and walks down to Odburo Street, a dark, narrow street near the river Vltava.

Scars

But prostitution in Prague is dangerous.

"When you get into a car with a customer you are trying to forecast what sort of man he is, whether he's violent, or a sexual deviant. It's a contest between the money and risking your life," Helena said.

The prostitutes run the risk of violent attack

Helena works with Tereza, whose head still bears the scars, white under the orange street lamps, of an attack by a man who picked her up two months ago.

"He said he had a flat tyre and stopped. He took the jack out of the car and beat me. Eventually I passed out," she explained.

At least Helena and Tereza are free.

Thousands of prostitutes in the Czech Republic are under the control of abusive pimps, addicted to drugs and infected with sexually transmitted diseases.

Syphilis is spreading among them, a disease that often precedes infection by HIV.

Sinful activity

To the Roman Catholic faithful prostitution has never been an issue much open to doubt - the church has unswervingly taught that it is a sin.

But prostitution is now blighting and destroying so many lives that Czech bishops now doubt that they have the luxury of easy answers.

Hundreds of babies are abandoned by the prostitutes

Bishop Maly, who played a prominent role in the revolution that toppled the communist regime in Prague, has decided that allowing prostitution to continue in a legal grey area is a greater evil that legalising it and bringing it under control.

"Even the church doesn't like us to touch this problem, but one must see this problem, one must be aware of this problem, and it isn't enough simply to moralise, to judge, but it is necessary to do something," he said.

Pregnant prostitutes

The prostitution the Bishop Maly is most concerned to control is on the bleak border with Germany. Here, prostitution is at its ugliest.

Among the lorries thundering down the motorway from Dresden to Prague are German motorists. For them Czech prostitutes are half the price they would be in Germany.

There is a bizarre quirk of the sex trade. German men prefer pregnant women. They can get up to twice as much money. The local orphanage in Teplice is populated with their abandoned babies.

The orphanage estimates that half of these children were the product of liaisons between prostitutes and their foreign clients here on the border with Germany.

Growing support

Many of the mothers are drug addicts and suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and many have been kidnapped to work here as prostitutes.

This is the evil the bishop wants to break, even at the cost of legalising prostitution.

But the bishop's break with orthodoxy has not resulted in protests from the Church hierarchy in the Czech Republic.

Father Daniel Herman, spokesman for the Czech Bishops' Council, says the Church must accept that prostitution is its problem as well as the state's, and legalising it may simply be to choose the lesser of two evils.

"It doesn't mean we don't believe what the bible says, or what the church says, but we have today different problems today, than for instance the people of the Church had three hundred years ago," he said.