A federal district judge on Wednesday sided with UW-Madison in a case over how much religion is too much when doling out money to faith-based student groups.

The ruling rejects claims made in a lawsuit filed a little more than a year ago by the Roman Catholic Foundation, a campus student group, that the university violated its First Amendment rights by refusing to fund some of its activities in the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years.

It also dissolves a preliminary injunction put into place in January by U.S. District Judge John Shabaz that barred the university from refusing to pay for activities by the group involving prayer, worship or proselytizing.

UW-Madison officials said they had not had a chance to review the ruling as of Wednesday night. Attempts to reach attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund -- a Christian-based legal advocacy group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of the foundation and two student members -- were not successful.

In his decision, federal District Judge Lynn Adelman noted that under the Constitution, the university is not prohibited from funding sectarian activities by student groups, but neither is it required to fund them.

The foundation had sought money -- generated from student fees and distributed by the student association and the chancellor -- to support things like printing costs for a pamphlet on the Rosary and the cost of bringing nuns from Italy to Madison to meet with members of the group.

Adelman wrote the university "has not established any reason that justified" not funding the activities but at the same time had not tried specifically to suppress religious viewpoints.

"Plaintiffs have identified no topic on which the University has excluded religious viewpoints," Adelman wrote. "They have not shown, for example, that the University funds secular speech about abortion and birth control but prohibits RCF from expressing a Catholic perspective on these topics."

Wednesday's ruling ends, at least for now, two years of legal wrangling over whether student fees can be used to support student groups' religious activities.

RCF, then known as the University of Wisconsin Roman Catholic Foundation, had sought and received student fee funding beginning with the 2004-05 academic year. In 2006, in order to continue receiving funds, it applied to become a registered student organization. The university denied that request because the group was run by church officials, not students, and because its membership was limited to Catholics.

The foundation sued the university but the suit was settled in May 2007, with the foundation agreeing to become student-run and the university agreeing to its budget requests as long as they did not go toward clergy-led activities.

It later refused to reimburse the group for some of the religious activities it had engaged in.