Religion and History in San Marino

San Marino traces its founding, by tradition, to the Christian stonemason Marinus in the year 301, who is said to have fled to Monte Titano to escape the persecution of Christians on the nearby Dalmatian coast. On that foundation the republic counts itself the oldest continuously governed state in the world, a claim bound up from the start with a specifically Christian origin story. Roman Catholicism has remained the near-universal faith of San Marino's small population throughout its history, expressed civically through churches used for state ceremonies and through the twin Captains Regent who have presided over the republic in a system unbroken since the medieval commune.

San Marino was never formally proclaimed a confessional state, and its modern constitution guarantees freedom of worship for all residents. The republic's tiny size and total encirclement by Italy long kept it religiously homogeneous, but recent decades have brought small communities of Jehovah's Witnesses, Baha'is, Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Christians and the Waldensian Church, protected by the same constitutional guarantees that have never disturbed the Catholic Church's practical primacy in San Marino's public life.