It is possible to claim that studies on Catholic schools, while providing an understanding on the strategies of socialization, also contribute to make visible new configurations of the Catholic Church's power. We believe that the values and behaviors produced in the Catholic Church are the basis for the actions of its lay leadership, which could even express certain specific ways of thinking inside the Church. This paper aims to demonstrate how the religious educational work developed by a traditional Catholic school for boys in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950's hopes to instill Christian morality in the boys' lives while molding a certain type of student. The concepts of socialization and youth in addition to Rio de Janeiro and the Catholic Church in the 1950's will be explored at first. Further, the focus of the paper will turn to all the practices of religious education used by the above mentioned traditional Catholic school as well as some social characteristics of the students who were subject to such pedagogical framework.
religious institutions; catholic church; religious education; elites