Religious school education in constitutions and laws of Republican Peru

Abstract

The author performs a review of the Constitutions of Peru, as well as the most important educational laws of the Republican era in relation to religious school teaching. Also with regard to the fundamental religious spirit of the various magna letters of Peru.
The long Catholic tradition has left an important religious imprint, which resulted in a constitutional and legal consensus in the sense that religious teaching in school life must have a curricular presence and specifically, what is commonly called the religion course, in this case a catholic course, because the vast majority of the population belongs to it, but respecting parents and educational institutions freedom.
In the last decades and more, the constitutional freedom of cults has been logically concretized in the non-obligatory of religious catholic teaching to students whose parents do not wish it.
This study shows that this educational line has a close relationship with the whole sense of the constitutions, which also express, at least, an orientation of much support and respect for religion, in this case, for the Catholic religion essentially.
The author also notes that this relationship between State and Church, or if you want between religion and civility, is not a fundamentalist one as it is currently in various states of the world. In any case, it may have been a “regalist” for the election of the Bishops by the Congress (Patronage), but without major excesses. The educational legislation, although with certain variants according to national currents more or less clerical or anticlerical, has followed the same line due to the educational laws of these 200 years, as well as to the normativity.