In many Brazilian towns, the lot under the church on the main square used to belong to city hall. A survey released this weekend measured that practice nationwide: 4,802 municipal rules passed between 1995 and 2025 transfer the ownership or the use of public property to religious institutions. The study comes from the Observatório do Estado Laico (Secular State Observatory, OEL) and was reported on Sunday by Mônica Bergamo's column in the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, with reporting by Jullia Gouveia.

In practice, the transfers show up as laws and decrees that donate plots, lots or buildings to parishes and churches, or grant them the use of such assets. Each one depends on city councils and mayors. The survey catalogued rules from across the country issued over the past 30 years.

Why the study calls them unconstitutional

Of the total, 2,162 rules, or 45%, assign the property an exclusively religious use. In the group's assessment, those cases conflict with Brazil's Constitution because they amount to public financing of religious worship. The 1988 charter, in article 19, bars the federal government, the states and the municipalities from establishing religions or churches, subsidizing them or keeping relations of dependence or alliance with them.

The OEL is an organization set up to monitor the relationship between government and religion. According to the group, it collects and analyses laws, decrees and other rules at all three levels of Brazil's federation to identify patterns of privilege or unequal treatment between the state and religious groups. Donations of public assets to churches are among the violations it tracks. Researchers linked to the group include lawyer Meliza Franco, who holds a doctorate in state law from the University of São Paulo and serves as executive director, economist Raphael Corbi, a full professor at USP, and federal judge Renato Nigro, an associated researcher.

Because each donation requires a municipal rule, the decision to keep the practice or stop it sits with mayors and city council members, while prosecutors and courts can challenge transfers already made. The observatory says it uses the evidence it produces for legal and institutional action, one of its lines of work alongside monitoring and research.

What the survey found:

• 4,802 municipal rules across Brazil transfer the ownership or use of public property to religious institutions, from 1995 to 2025.
• 2,162 of them (45%) assign the property an exclusively religious use and were classified as unconstitutional by the OEL.
• To the observatory, those cases amount to public financing of worship, which the 1988 Constitution forbids.