A law passed in 2010 closed private institutions that delivered degrees in education, including the Normal Superior Catholic Institute Sedes Sapientiae
by Massimo Introvigne
The Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Bolivia is before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, to which it denounced the Bolivian government having exhausted all domestic remedies through which it asked that the Normal Superior Catholic Institute Sedes Sapientiae, closed on the basis of a law passed in 2010, should be re-opened.
Sedes Sapientiae is a prestigious institution whose alumni include distinguished teachers of what is today called in Bolivia “Spiritual Values and Religion,” but also of History, Languages, and Mathematics. Some served in political capacities.
In 2010, a Bolivian law granted to the state a monopoly on the formation of teachers. As a consequence, private institutions were gradually closed, including the Catholic Sedes Sapientiae and a parallel Adventist college.
The Catholic Bishops said they are now “tired” of requesting the reopening of Sedes Sapientiae to the authorities of the Ministry of Education. They had to turn to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to denounce the violation of the rights to freedom of education and freedom of religion.
“We have made several requests to the Ministry of Education for the reopening of the school, the Bishops said, based on the fact that we as a Church should have the possibility and the right to train our educators, our teachers.” The Bishops now believe that the IACHR will recognize that both the right to religious liberty and to freedom of education have been violated.
The question at issue is whether states are entitled to create monopolies in certain fields of higher education that exclude private academic institutions, including those inspired by specific religious values.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
