Religion in Bolivia
Before the arrival of Spanish missionaries, the people residing in the territory of modern day Bolivia practiced a variety of faiths.
[5] Religious and spiritual belief organizations are required to register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and acquire a national legal personality.
All schools are required to avoid dogmatic imposition and teach ethics courses which emphasize religious tolerance and interreligious dialogue.
Conservative and right-wing parties on the other hand tend to privilege Christian beliefs, as evidenced before the accession to power of Jeanine Áñez in 2019 (“The Bible returns to the Government Palace”).
[2] A plethora of religious orders – Franciscans, Mercedarians, Dominicans, and Jesuits were the most prominent – joined diocesan priests in the colonial ministry.
[2] By the end of the colonial era, a combination of money lending and shrewd real estate investments had made the church the dominant financial power in Bolivia.
[2] Independence in 1825 brought some changes to Bolivian church-state relations, though the Roman Catholic Church retained its status as the nation's sole religion.
[2] No longer could the government have a voice in conciliar decrees, briefs, or bulls that the pope issued or play a role in the selection of high-ranking church officials.
[2] Freed from direct government control, the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s attempted to establish a more visible presence in Bolivian society.
[2] This experience led to the formation in 1968 of Church and Society in Latin America-Bolivia (Iglesia y Sociedad en América Latina-Bolivia – ISAL-Bolivia).
[2] In a subsequent pastoral letter, the bishops stated that although priests had an obligation to promote needed social change, they could not identify with specific political parties or movements.
[2] Established in 1973 as a research arm of the episcopate, the commission quickly became active in defending the rights of political prisoners of the military government led by Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez.
[2] Although the CEB recognized that the economic crisis of the early and mid-1980s required strong measures, it publicly questioned the wisdom of the stabilization policies adopted in 1985 by President Víctor Paz Estenssoro.
[2] Endorsing the position adopted at the Latin American Bishops Conference in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, the CEB suggested that Paz Estenssoro's New Economic Policy (Nueva Política Económica – NPE) would generate increasing levels of inequality in society.
[2] In 1986 the Roman Catholic Church was organized into four archdioceses (La Paz, Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, and Sucre), four dioceses, two territorial prelatures and six apostolic vicariates.
Left-wing terrorists murdered two Mormon missionaries from the United States who had been working in a squatter community near La Paz.
[2] Seventh-day Adventists and members of a variety of Pentecostal denominations gained increasing numbers of adherents among the rural and urban squatter populations.
[citation needed] Due to these denominations tending to emphasize individual salvation and to de-emphasize social and political issues, many leftists charged that they were agents of the United States government.
Palestinian immigrants visited the country for the first time in 1970 and built the first Muslim community site called Centro Islamico Boliviano and located in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1986.
[citation needed] The famous mosque in Bolivia is the Mezquita Yebel An-Nur which is located in La Paz and was founded in 2004.
