Ne Temere
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Ne Temere (literally meaning "not rashly" in Latin) is a decree (named for its opening words) of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Council declaring invalid any marriage of a Roman Catholic or any person who has ever been a Roman Catholic, unless contracted before a qualified Roman Catholic priest (or the bishop of the diocese) and at least two witnesses. The decree was issued under Pius X, 10 August 1907, and took effect on Easter 19 April 1908. This decree was voided for marriages in Germany by the subsequent decree Provida.
The explicit intent was to eliminate clandestine marriages, with the justification that the Roman Church has "always very justly detested and forbidden secret marriages" extending a decree of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent enforcing parish discipline in matters of betrothal and marriage. However, it did not just prohibit secret marriages, but any marriage which did not have the explicit authority of the Catholic Church.
The result made official civil marriages difficult for lapsed Catholics in some Church-dominated nations. It also made mixed marriages between Roman Catholics and non-Roman Catholics conditional on the approval of the Church (or for the Catholic to face excommunication), and thus allowed the Church to impose conditions such as an obligation for any children to be baptised and brought up as Catholics, and for the non-Catholic partners to submit to religious education with the aim of converting them to Catholicism. The decree proved particularly divisive in Ireland, which has a large Protestant minority, and contributed indirectly to the subsequent political conflict there.
Sydney Macartney’s film "A Love Divided" tells the story of the infamous Fethard-on-Sea incident. In the late 1950s, Sheila Kelly is a Protestant who chooses to marry Sean Cloney, a Catholic, in Fethard-on-Sea in County Wexford, Ireland. Nine years later she decides to send her daughter to a non-Catholic school.
As a Protestant, Sheila had to sign the Ne temere pledge, agreeing to bring up their children as Catholics. When their eldest daughter reached school-going age, the local priest, Father Stafford, insisted that she go to the local Catholic school. Sheila felt this was a decision that ought to be taken by herself and her husband, and a furious row broke out first in Fethard and then it spread across Ireland.
In May 1957, in a virulently sectarian campaign organised by Father Stafford and local politicians, the town's Protestant-owned shops were boycotted, a Protestant music teacher lost 12 of her 13 pupils, and the Catholic teacher of the local Protestant school was forced to resign. This happened in Ireland in the summer of 1957. Father Stafford also helped set up a Vigilance Committee to ensure Catholics were abiding by the rules. In 1998 the Roman Catholic Bishop Brendan Comiskey apologised for the campaign.
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."
The continued application of Ne Temere has been used as a justification for continuation of the discriminatory provisions of the UK's Act of Settlement 1701.
The mandate for the children of mixed marriages to be raised Catholic does not appear in the 1983 Code of Canon Law.