Sidewinder wrote: 
I was going to rant against the incestuous relationship between Church and State there; then I remembered that, the way things are now, some jackass American politician WILL propose making the US government pay for teaching Christian whatever in the public education system, and another jackass will march around the White House in support of such a jackass bill.
I guess it's time to renew my passport and call my Taiwanese relatives for help in immigrating there.
It comes from the times of the transition to democracy. Back in the days of Franco, the pseudo-fascist ideology that governed Spain was called National Catholicism, which is pretty damn self-explanatory.
There were agreements between Spain and the Vatican that ensured that in exchange for cartloads of money, Franco had the authority to designate the candidates to become bishops and such, ensuring that no critical voices got positions of power... at least, until the last days, when the Vatican decided to put some distance. The "red priests" influenced by the Vatican II mostly were kept in the lower echelons of the organization.
After Franco died, the agreements were revised. Under this revision, the Church was supposed to become self-financing after a while (about twenty years ago) and didn't cause trouble during a rather complicated period, in exchange for things like a explicit acknowledgement of the Catholic hegemony in Spain in the Constitution of 1978 (right next to the declaration of freedom of cult) and the religion education thing.
Nowadays, we have several thousand teachers of religion that are paid by the gov and kind of tyrannized by the bishops (who have control in their districts). There was a major political ruckus more or less recently, when the Socialists decided to introduce Islamic and Jew religion classes and this subject was removed altogether from the calculations used to get the average grade of the term.
Hope this clears things a bit.
