Sir, - A leading canon lawyer has shown that the State's new marriage laws interfere with the Catholic Church's right to regulate the marriages of Catholics. The church's right to control Catholic marriages can be identified as existing for at least four and a half centuries (from the time when Henry VIII established his new church and marriage laws, which our ancestors rejected). The British occupying power confirmed this right in the Marriages (Ireland) Act, 1844, which contained specific provision for the celebration of Catholic marriages without reference to civil law.
This attempt to take over the church's function and to invade its proper sphere of jurisdiction by requiring the parties to give notice to the registrar was slipped in, in the course of legislation designed to clear up problems connected with divorce. This should be rejected. Those responsible have the audacity to suggest that a Catholic marriage could be invalid if the parties had not given three months' notice to the registrar.
This requirement should be ignored, because if the politicians were to attempt to treat a marriage as invalid, then a divorce law could not apply to that marriage. If a couple wish to protect their marriage, they should not give this prior notice to the registrar. They should insist on the present practice of its registration in the sacristy, immediately after the marriage ceremony. (Registration is simply a statistical procedure like the registration of births and deaths.)
Priests should refrain from acting as agents of the civil power. Their function is to celebrate marriages where the church's laws are complied with. Indeed this notice provision may have been designed to bring Catholic marriages within the ambit of civil law for the purpose of divorce, in case it might be argued that Catholic marriages are not subject to civil law, and therefore not capable of being broken by divorce, which is the position under church law. A Catholic marriage remains in being and unaffected by a civil divorce decree. Yours, etc., The Irish Family League, PO Box No 3228,
Dublin 8.