Article 130 Political Constitution of the United Mexican States

The historical principle of the separation of the State and the churches guides the rules contained in this article. The churches and other religious groupings shall be subject to the law.

It corresponds exclusively to the Congress of the Union to legislate on matters of public worship and of churches and religious groupings. The respective regulatory law, which shall be of public order, shall develop and specify the following provisions:

a)The churches and religious groupings shall have legal personality as religious associations once they obtain their corresponding registration. The law shall regulate such associations and shall determine the conditions and requirements for the constitutive registration thereof.

b)The authorities shall not intervene in the internal life of the religious associations;

c)Mexicans may exercise the ministry of any worship. Mexicans as well as foreigners must, for this purpose, satisfy the requirements indicated by the law;

d)In the terms of the regulatory law, ministers of worship may not hold public offices. As citizens they shall have the right to vote, but not to be voted for. Those who, in advance and in the form established by law, have ceased to be ministers of worship may be voted for.

e)Ministers may not associate for political purposes nor carry out proselytism in favor of or against any candidate, party or political association. Nor may they in public meeting, in acts of worship or religious propaganda, or in publications of a religious character, oppose the laws of the country or its institutions, nor offend, in any form, the national symbols.

The formation of all kinds of political groupings whose title has any word or indication whatsoever that relates it to any religious confession is strictly prohibited. Meetings of a political character may not be held in the temples.

The mere promise to tell the truth and to fulfill the obligations that are contracted, subjects the one who makes it, in case of failing it, to the penalties that the law establishes for that reason.

Ministers of worship, their ascendants, descendants, siblings and spouses, as well as the religious associations to which those ministers belong, shall be incapable of inheriting by will from the persons to whom those same ministers have provided spiritual guidance or assistance and who are not related within the fourth degree.

The acts of civil status of persons are of the exclusive competence of the administrative authorities in the terms established by the laws, and shall have the force and validity that the same attribute to them.

The federal authorities, those of the states (federal entities), those of the Municipalities and those of the territorial demarcations of Mexico City, shall have in this matter the powers and responsibilities determined by the law.