the previous dictatorial government, public schools were forced to provide religious education classes. In 1946, the Argentine Senate approved a legal re-affirmation of all the decrees passed by the military junta. This law was debated in the less docile Chamber of Deputies, and was finally passed thanks to the vote of the Peronists, who submitted to the will of the Executive Branch. The arguments presented were nationalistic and anti-liberal, identifying Argentine nationality with the deep Catholicism of the motherland, Spain, and also emphasizing religion as a means to create a personal conscience and an ordered society. The religious education law, however, limited the powers of the Church: teachers, curricular contents and textbooks were designated by the State, after consultations with the Church if need be. Besides this, the rest of the school subjects were independent of religious influence, and therefore followed the secular tradition of Argentine education. The Peronist government also introduced subjects such as sports, hygiene and sanitary care, which the Church deemed excessively concerned with bodily matters. Finally, education became a vehicle for quasi-religious propaganda for the personality cult of the president and his wife Eva. In June 1950 Perón appointed Armando Méndez San Martín, an anti-Catholic (accused by the Church of being a Freemason), as Minister of Education. "Democratic" Catholics were opposed to a full integration of religion and State, but rather preferred a separation between State and Church that granted all schools (public and private, including confessional ones) to receive state funding. These Catholics were in the minority and had no representation before Peronism. During his second term, Perón resented the Vatican's aspiration to promote the formation of Catholic-based political parties (i. e. Christian Democracy parties). In 1954, out of political rather than ideological reasons, the government suppressed religious education in schools and attempted to legalize prostitution, to pass a divorce law and to promote a constitutional amendment to separate State and Church. Perón publicly accused bishops and priests of sabotaging his government. On 1955-06-14, during the Corpus Christi procession, the bishops Manuel Tato and Ramón Novoa spoke against Perón, turning the celebration into an anti-government demonstration. Perón demanded the removal of the bishops to the Vatican. During the night, violent Peronist groups attacked and burned churches in Buenos Aires. Anti-Peronists in the military, who were mostly Catholic, and factions of the Church, had been long encouraged by this building tension. On 16 June, two days