Ne Temere - Conflicts of Laws

Conflicts of Laws

Before and after 1907, legal reforms across Europe were slowly creating new personal freedoms. Ne Temere was widely criticised by non-Catholics for restricting choice in family matters.

The issue of the Roman Catholic Church's Canon law declaring marriages invalid, which were however recognised as valid by the State, raised major political and judicial issues in Canada, especially Quebec, and in Australia. In New South Wales, the legislature came within one vote of making a criminal offence the promulgation of the decree.

The use of the decree to extract commitments in mixed marriages led to state-sanctioned enforcements in the Irish courts, such as the Tilson v. Tilson judgement, where Judge Gavan Duffy, then President of the High Court, said:

"In my opinion, an order of the court designed to secure the fulfilment of an agreement peremptorily required before a mixed marriage by the Church, whose special position in Ireland is officially recognised as the guardian of the faith of the Catholic spouse, cannot be withheld on any ground of public policy by the very State which pays homage to that Church."

A similar dispute led to the Fethard-on-Sea incident. The New Ulster Movement publication "Two Irelands or one?" in 1972 contained the following recommendation regarding any future United Ireland:

"The removal of the protection of the courts, granted since the Tilson judgement of 1950, to the Ne temere decree of the Roman Catholic Church. This decree which requires the partners in a mixed marriage to promise that all the children of their marriage be brought up as Roman Catholics, is the internal rule of one particular Church. For State organs to support it is, therefore, discriminatory."

BBC Radio Ulster examined the decree and its impact on a single Belfast family, with a mixed Presbyterian and Catholic marriage performed in a Presbyterian church, in its 2010 documentary Mixing Marriages.