The programs from religious communities and confessions rooted in Portugal will now be broadcast starting at 1 PM on RTP2, starting Monday, as announced by the Commission on Broadcast Time for Religious Confessions (CTECR). The program A Fé dos Homens will now be transmitted at 1 PM, Monday to Friday, with a repeat the following mornings between 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM. The programs Caminhos and 70×7 remain on Sunday, also with a schedule starting at 1 PM and a repeat in the early morning of the following day at 6 AM.
RTP, as a public radio and television service operator, guarantees religious confessions broadcast time for the pursuit of their religious purposes, in compliance with Article 25 of the Religious Freedom Law. According to this article, churches and other registered religious communities are guaranteed a broadcast time set globally, and they may participate on their own, through their respective representative organization, or jointly.
The CTECR called for dissemination of the new schedule, hoping it will contribute to building audience loyalty to a specific time slot. The commission committed to publicizing the change through each confession's own channels, noting that the schedule may be subject to changes in the case of live broadcasts, as provided for in the protocol with RTP.
The program A Fé dos Homens has been broadcast on RTP2 since September 1997, under a protocol signed between the religious confessions and RTP, which was updated in 2003 to also include the program 70×7, whose first broadcast dates back to October 1979, and the program Caminhos. The allocation and distribution of broadcast time are carried out according to objective criteria and in accordance with the representativeness of each religious confession.
