The Spanish bishops have once again pronounced on the organic law on education (LOE). They did so at the end of the meeting of the permanent Commission of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, held in recent days. The bishops’ statement, reports the Fides press agency, follows that of 28 February in which it was explained that the new law does not regulate the teaching of religion in such a way as to safeguard the rights of everyone and not to violate the rights of parents in the education of their children. This time the bishops spoke of the new working statute for teachers of religion and of the new subject on the curriculum called “Education in citizenship”. As for teachers, the bishops consider that the Royal Decree “does not conform with the Accord on teaching between the Spanish State and the Holy See” and do not exclude “appropriate legal actions”. As for “Education in Citizenship”, whose objective is the formation of the moral conscience of pupils, the bishops recall that the new law “involves a grave violation of the primary and inalienable right of parents, in partnership with schools, to choose the moral formation they wish for their children. Catholic schools, in fact, would be obliged by the Law to introduce into their curricula a subject that is incompatible with their own ideology; while State schools, losing their own compulsory ideological neutrality, would impose on all those who have opted for Catholic religion another moral formation that they themselves did not choose”.
