Freedom of teaching? Attacked against freedom of conscience? Parliamentary discussions on the use of Brother Damasceno's manuals in the secular classrooms of Uruguay in the first half of the twentieth century

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the arguments of the parliamentary discussions that took place in 1932, around a national history book elaborated by a French religious and used in the educational institutions managed by the Uruguayan State. The juridical separation of Church and State was enshrined in the Constitution of 1919 in Uruguay, but the freedom of teaching was debated in the political cast due to the growth of schools and works of religious instruction. The books produced by Brother Damasceno included data on the religiosity of the Uruguayan people and their leaders, as well as the Church's performance in the historical processes from the colony to recent times. Their presence in the classrooms of the secular state was a topic debated in the government by various political sectors. In order to carry out this work, the works of this author were recovered and the parliamentary debates between August and October 1932 were consulted. Through these sources we seek to reconstruct the roles intended by the Church and the State in the first decades of the twentieth century.