Santo Domingo holds the first cathedral, the first monastery and the first university of the Americas, and Dominican Catholicism has traded on that primacy ever since. The institutional arrangement is unusual for the region in that it has not been dismantled: a concordat signed with the Holy See in 1954, under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, remains in force and gives the Catholic Church public funding, tax exemption, chaplaincies and a place in state education that no other body holds. Attempts to renegotiate it have not succeeded.
Trujillo's use of the church was instrumental and the church's relationship with him ended badly for both. The bishops eventually issued a pastoral letter against the regime in 1960, after the murder of the Mirabal sisters, and the rupture is a founding moment for the modern Dominican church.
Catholic identification has fallen sharply in recent decades while evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown, particularly in the poorer barrios and among Dominicans of Haitian descent.
The national devotion is to the Virgin of Altagracia, whose basilica at Higuey draws a national pilgrimage each 21 January, with people walking through the night from across the east of the country. The image is a small painted panel of Spanish origin, and the devotion attached to it is entirely Dominican.
The country's African derived religion is widely practised and rarely named, for reasons bound up with a long official insistence on distinguishing Dominican identity from Haitian.