Bolivia's Morales drops secular education proposal http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-06-25T221004Z_01_N25279115_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-BOLIVIA.xml&archived=False
Sun Jun 25, 2006
By Mario Roque
LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales has scrapped a proposal to drop religious education from the school curriculum because of opposition by the country's powerful Catholic Church.
About 80 percent of Bolivians are Catholics and the leftist government's proposal to replace religion lessons with ethics classes has been one of the few issues to spark controversy as the country prepares to rewrite its constitution.
Bolivians go to the polls next Sunday to pick representatives to a national assembly that will start the job of reforming the constitution in August -- a key election pledge of Morales, who says the reform will "refound" Bolivia.
"There's no reason for a confrontation or a distancing between the church and the state," La Paz Archbishop Edmundo Abastoflor, who is also vice president of the country's Episcopal Conference of church leaders, was quoted as saying by state news agency ABI after receiving assurances from Morales on Saturday.
"We've cleared up a few things, and I want to reiterate that there's a lot of common ground between the Catholic Church, the government and MAS (Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party)," ABI quoted Morales as saying. Church leaders called for talks with the president to raise their concerns over the education minister's proposals, which have also drawn protests from parents and students.
Jesus Juarez, archbishop of the city of El Alto, had threatened to organize street protests to defend religious teaching. Impoverished El Alto is one of Morales' most important support bases.
Another influential priest in the city of nearly 1 million people, Sebastian Obermaier, praised "the wisdom of president Morales."
Last week he said he would urge his parishioners not to vote for MAS in the July 2 election due to the proposal.
Bolivia's constitution recognizes Catholicism as the official religion, but the church has already said it would accept the change to a secular state. Its main concern is over any drive to make society less religious in general.
Morales, a Catholic and Bolivia's first indigenous president, was elected in December on pledges to establish the so-called constitutional assembly that he says will help end 500 years of discrimination against the indigenous majority by a European-descended elite.
(Additional reporting by Carlos Quiroga in La Paz)
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