PODER POLÍTICO Y UNIVERSIDAD CONFESIONAL. El Estado Docente frente a lafundación de las universidades católicas de Chile (1888) y Perú (1917)

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the founding processes of the Catholic University of Chile (1888) and the Catholic University of Peru (1917). The accent is placed on the actions undertaken by various Catholic leaders (bishops, religious and laity) who, in coordination with the Holy See, sought to overcome the opposition of influential sectors of the political class that sought to preserve the state monopoly on higher education. This phenomenon is understood as part of the "cultural wars" that took place between the supporters of institutional and educational secularization and the defenders of the Catholic denomination. In both Peru and Chile, Catholics, thanks to the prior process of ecclesial renewal, they confronted the model of the educational State in order to recover the presence of the Church in culture and in the university environment. Despite the differences between the two cases, they did not occur in isolation from each other. Rather, the existence of common influences, characters and patterns in the origin of the two institutions and in their defense strategies against their opponents, reveal that it was a transnational phenomenon where the networks of religious and laity, together with the active presence of Rome, played a central role.