Article I: The Law Before the Code

211. • a) If you attend only to the law of nature or even to divine-positive law, it must be confessed that every matrimony, however clandestine, provided the contracting parties, not impeded, express true consent concerning the present, is true and valid, and, if there is question of baptized persons, a true sacrament.

212. • b) Nevertheless it is not licit to turn into doubt that the Church, with respect to the matrimonies of the faithful, can not only establish impediments properly so called, even diriment ones, but with equal right prescribe the form of celebrating matrimony under penalty of nullity of the matrimonial contract.

213. • c) Indeed, the Church always abhorred and interdicted clandestine matrimonies, as being the source of many and grave evils. But up to the Council of Trent she did not hold them invalid.

214. • d) 1. The Tridentine synod, through the celebrated decree beginning Tametsi,¹ prescribed the form of celebrating matrimony, from defect of which unions would be not only illicit but even plainly invalid.

¹ Sess. XXIV, cap. I, De reform. matrim.

"Those who attempt matrimony otherwise than in the presence of the parish priest, or of another priest with the permission of that parish priest or of the Ordinary, and of two or three witnesses, the holy Synod renders altogether incapable of contracting thus, and decrees that contracts of this kind are invalid and null, just as by the present decree it makes them invalid and annuls them."

2. Nevertheless, the Tridentine Fathers commanded, lest innumerable matrimonies of heretics become invalid on this head, that the decree should not exert its force except after thirty days from its promulgation made in each parish.

In fact, in many regions it was never promulgated. What were the places in which it was promulgated, and which inhabitants of those places the decree obliged, often was not established.

3. Under Tridentine legislation, the parish priest (or Ordinary) of domicile or quasi-domicile was competent to assist with respect only to his own subjects, and indeed everywhere on earth, whether through himself or through a delegate. Passive assistance of the parish priest was sufficient, even if forced and unwilling.

The state of legislation introduced by the Tridentine Council with respect to the celebration of matrimony in the Church was in force up to 19 April 1908.

215. • On 2 August 1907 the Sacred Congregation of the Council issued the decree Ne temere, which nevertheless began to oblige from the following feast of Easter, on 19 April 1908. This law, which, with few things changed, was received into the Code of Canon Law, introduced a new discipline with regard to the form of matrimony.