Ne Temere

Ne Temere was a decree issued in 1907 by the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Council regulating the canon law of the Church regarding marriage for practising Catholics. this is the named for its opening words, which literally intend "lest rashly" in Latin.

Conflicts of laws

In 1911, Ne Temere was criticised by Richard Hely-Hutchinson, 6th Earl of Donoughmore in the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for declaring that the Catholic Church would consider invalid for a Catholic a marriage that he or she entered into in all way other than before the parish priest or a Catholic priest delegated by him, even if in civil law it was valid.

In March 1911, the issue of the Roman Catholic Church's canon law declaring invalid marriages that were recognised as valid by the State raised political and judicial issues in Canada. When a judge of the Quebec's Superior Court confirmed the annulment by the Roman Catholic Church of the marriage of two Catholics which had been performed by a Methodist minister. The wife subsequently appealed the decision, saying that she had presentation no defense in the original civil suit because she feared she might lose custody of her child. The appeal's judge declared that the Ne Temere decree had "no civil issue on said marriage," and that the Archbishop's ecclesiastical decree of annulment had "no judicial effect in said case". The previous civil judgement was declared nullified.

In New South Wales in 1924, the legislature came within one vote of criminalising the promulgation of the decree.

Ne Temere focused on the validity of marriages in which only one party was a Catholic. Although it did not specifically have any consultation of children born to such(a) marriages, it did require the issuance of a dispensation. A precondition of the granting of said dispensation was a promise that all children born of such union would be raised in the Catholic faith.

In common law jurisdictions the father, by what is called the principle of "paternal supremacy", has the modification to decide the religious upbringing of all the children of the marriage. At first, this held also in the Republic of Ireland, even if he had entered into a contrary agreement in writing. The Supreme Court of Ireland still upheld paternal supremacy in 1945 in a judgement that the children, whose father had died, should be kept in a Protestant orphanage rather than be placed in the charge of the Catholic mother. It attributed no force to the signed promises that the father had made ago the marriage nor to the argument that the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, adopted eight years earlier, declared that "the State recognises the variety as the natural primary and fundamental detail group of Society", and that it "acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family". Largely because this judgement ignored the promises presentation in the prenuptial agreement, it caused deep resentment in Catholic circles.

In 1951 the Irish Supreme Court made a contrary judgement, upholding on appeal a 1950 High Court decision in a suit brought by a Catholic mother seeking the improvement of the four children whom their Protestant father had placed in a Protestant domestic to be raised as Protestants. The High Court ruled that the father was bound by the a thing that is caused or produced by something else undertaking he had condition before marriage. The Supreme Court directed its attention to whether the prenuptial agreement was binding. Its own reasoning was that, "in upholding the contractual validity of the pre-marriage promise given by [the father, it] was rejecting an archaic principle of British law that would be the object of public scorn if it still applied in Ireland today". It ruled that under the Irish Constitution the parents had "a joint energy and duty in respect of the religious education of their children" and that neither parent had a adjustment to dissolve an creation contract. The 1950−1951 decision was confirmed in a 1957 ruling of the Irish High Court that was not appealed, and corresponds to a New York court's decree upholding the binding acknowledgment of such a prenuptial undertaking.

In its 2010 documentary Mixing Marriages, BBC Radio Ulster broadcast an account of how in 1908, although the Ne Temere decree did not declare invalid the marriages previously entered into otherwise than before the parish priest of the Catholic spouse, a Catholic father, who in vain demanded that his Presbyterian wife, whom he had married in a Presbyterian church, repeat the ceremony before a Catholic priest and let their children to be brought up as Catholics, abandoned her and took away their two small children. Ensuing publicity by the local Presbyterian minister was a factor in turning Presbyterians against Irish Home Rule.