I am palnnig to move to spain in the future and starting to do initial home work.

My wife and I are not religious, we have not baptised our children (4 and 9), and due to the fact that the Italian schooling system (we are italian btw) teaches you (twice weekly) only the Roman Catholic religion, our children step out of class and (by law) are given some other activitites instead. They obviosuly do not take bible class (afterschool), something all children do here in our town. I want to stress the fact that my kids do not feel left out in any way and have many friends and are growing up very well with no problems whatsoever. However I have just found out that our local priest has told my eldests’ friends not to play with children whom do not take bible class - something I expect from such close mindedness in local and national church reppresentatives here. Of course her friends say they will not listen to this priest.

We both are not against religion in general but I am highly critical of the clergy, the pope and the general views religion takes and gives in our country. I have heard that in most european schools ‘general religion’ and not only Roman Catholic is taught as schools, thus giving the youngster a general cultural view of many religions and this has my full support. Unfortunatly this is not the case in italy (allthough our constitution says we are a laic country)

My wife works with the mentally and phisically dissabled and this coop is headed by a ‘worker’ priest (as they are known here) and this is the kind of people religion should be about.

Anyways my question is, can paople who have children at local state schools tell me if religion class is included and if so what are they teaching the kids? DO you see this kind of close minded ness there in spain too?

Any input on relationship between spanish schools and religion is greatly appreciated.

Claudio

As far as I understand it, religion and schools are separate and anyone can opt out of the religion classes if they wish, similar to Italy by the sounds of it. Where I live there is a high percentage of Muslims who take there own relgious classes and there is something called ‘ethics’ for those who don’t want anything which is general behaviour, morals etc. Any afterschool classes, are obviously completely optional.
Spain isn’t like the UK where you can have general religion classes which touch on all religions, but by law they can’t force you to take ‘religion’.

Thanks for info. Sounds like Spain (yet again) is a step ahead of Italy.

Thanks Nizzo for imput.