Sir, The simple requirement that three months' notice of intention to marry should be given to the appropriate authority seems to have provoked a peculiar crisis in Church State relations. We hear remarkable, if rare, tales of clergy knowingly presiding at marriages without any validity in Irish law.
Various writers have suggested that confusion could be removed by separating Church and State entirely in this matter and by introducing a mandatory civil ceremony at every marriage, followed by an optional church ceremony. A note of warning needs to be sounded here.
Many people, myself included, dislike the implication that ordinary marriage and "Christian" marriage are two distinct and separable things, to be procured at different times in different places. The Church may have legitimate views concerning marriages, and may have an interest in supporting marriage as the corner stone of society, but it is not its place to offers a distinct or superior form of marriage.
A marriage in a registry office is, accordingly, to be viewed as complete and fully authentic. Therefore, if a "civil" marriage ceremony becomes mandatory in all cases, what must follow in church is never a wedding per se, but rather a service of prayer and dedication following marriage. The couple would arrive at the church as a married couple, not as a couple about to be married.
In the case of the Church of Ireland, about which I inevitably know most, a compulsory "civil" marriage would probably mean an immediate end to all Church weddings in the Republic, precisely because we recognise the authority of the law to establish and, in extremes, to dissolve marriage. To remove the right of the clergy to solemnise marriages with civil validity would put an end to a constructive, if at times complicated partnership between Church and State which has been placed on a firm statutory basis since at least 1844, and in the implementation of which the Church has always behaved with scrupulous care.
Furthermore, the possible ending of church weddings in the Church of Ireland (and perhaps in other "Protestant" traditions too) would have untold and unhelpful ecumenical implications as regards the marriages of countless inter church couples. It would also introduce a new and unnecessary North/South division in marriage law into Ireland.
Let us hope that the requirement to give three months' notice is the first step in making our marriage procedures clearer and more logical, as opposed to the first step in destroying arrangements that still have considerable potential for good and are a most ingenious legacy of our history. Yours etc., The Rectory, Bandon, Co. Cork.