Weathering the storm. catholic schools facing the Church’s crisis in the last decade in Chile

ABSTRACT

Religious schools are facing cultural and social challenges at a time when secularisation processes are accelerating in Chile. This obstacle is particularly true for Catholic Schools (made up more than 90% of religious schools in the country) that, in the last decade, have had to function over an internal crisis due to sexual abuse by the clergy. Catholic education, specifically schooling, has had a long-standing importance in the country, which adds another layer of symbolic difficulties. In this article, we present the results of a study that aimed to describe the changes experienced by the Catholic school subsystem concerning the institutional affiliation of schools to the Church, their eligibility, and school enrolment in Chile from 2013-2022. Using a quantitative research design, we found no clear relationships between changes in key variables in Catholic Church-more linked schools and the crisis of this Church, except for the drop in eligibility in one of the five analysed Chile´s administrative regions. We discussed possible explanations for what we defined as an inelastic demand for Catholic schools in the country. We also propose ways to continue the research on the matter.

KEYWORDS:

• Catholic schools
• Crisis in the Catholic Church
• Enrolment effects
• Religious Orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article we refer to schools to mean primary and secondary schools.

2. The Local Public Education Services are decentralised public services created by the Law 21,040 (2017). This bill states that from 2018 until 2030 LPES will be installed throughout the national territory to provide the educational service at the levels of preschool, basic and secondary education. Educational establishments run by municipalities will be gradually transferred to these services. To date, 11 local services have been created out of a total of 70 that will be distributed in the country.

3. The School Admission System (SAS) is a school choice system based on a web platform that has information on all public and subsidised private schools in the country and is the mandatory application mechanism for families who want to enrol their children in schools that receive State subsidies. Its implementation began in 2016 in the Magallanes Region, continued in 2017 in the regions of Tarapacá, Coquimbo, O’Higgins and Los Lagos, and between 2018 and 2019 it finished adding to the remaining 16 regions of the country.

4. Prior to the Inclusion Law, subsidised schools were able to charge families and take evaluation tests as mechanism of admission, which left many families out from the school of their preference.

5. Between 2006 and 2022, the number of Catholics decreased from 70% to 48%, and those who said they have no religious denomination or to be agnostic/atheist grew from 14% to 30% in the same period, and to 43% in those between 18–24 (Encuesta Bicentenario, 2022). The same study shows that in 2022, persists a strong belief in God among the Chilean population (73%), which reflects the specific impact that adherence to a form of institutionalised religion, such as Catholicism, has had.

6. The SAS began its implementation in 2016 in the Magallanes region and progressively advanced in the rest of the country. In 2017 it was implemented in the regions of Tarapacá, Coquimbo, O’Higgins, and Los Lagos.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Stipendienwerk Lateinamerika-Deutschland.

Notes on contributors

Cristóbal Madero

Cristóbal Emilfork is a Sociocultural Anthropology PhD student from the University of California – Davis, M.St. in the Study of Religions from the University of Oxford, and M.A. in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Andrea Horn

Andrea Horn is an associate professor at the Research and Postgraduate School in the Education Faculty of the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez.

Constanza Lobos

Constanza Lobos is a PhD Student in Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile.

Cristóbal Emilfork

Cristóbal Madero is an assistant professor at the Department of Education Policy in the school of Education, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile