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 regulating the canon law of the Church about marriage for Roman Catholics (in the sense all persons who had been baptized into, or made a profession of faith in, the Catholic Church). To the clandestinity requirements of the decree Tametsi of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, it reiterated the requirements that the marriage be witnessed by a priest and two other witnesses (adding that this requirement had now universal), added requirements that the priest (or bishop) being witness to the marriage must be the pastor of the parish (or the bishop of the diocese), or be the delegate of one of those, the marriage being invalid otherwise, and the marriage of a couple, neither one resident in the parish (or diocese), while valid, is illicit. It also required that marriages be registered and provided some instances in which the priest was not required.

It explicitly laid out that non-Catholics, including baptized ones, were not bound by Catholic canon law for marriage, and therefore could contract valid and binding marriages without compliance.

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 result made official civil marriages difficult for lapsed Catholics in some Church-dominated nations.^{[citation needed]} It also meant that, because a priest could refuse to perform mixed marriages between Roman Catholics and non-Roman Catholics, he could 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 issue of the Roman Catholic Church declaring marriages invalid which were recognised as valid by the State raised major political and judicial issues in Canada, especially Quebec,[1] and in Australia. In New South Wales, the legislature came within one vote of making promulgating the decree a criminal offence; this sent the law to the popular vote, where, although many of the legislaters had been sent to office campaigning against it, the voters defeated it soundly.[2]

The use of the decree to extract commitments in mixed marriages led to enforcement in Republic of Ireland courts such as the Tilson v. Tilson judgement where Judge Gavan Duffy 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." Irish Law Times Report LXXXVI 1952, pages 49-73

A similar dispute led to the Fethard-on-Sea incident.[3] 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.[4]