The Religious Upbringing of Children in “Mixed Marriages”: The Evolution of Irish Law

Abstract

Mixed marriages have long been a vexed issue in Ireland. Although they have been frowned upon by both Christian traditions, in Ireland, church condemnation of them is coupled with a troubled historical backdrop. Conquest and colonization and the English Reformation established religion as a political identity whereby Protestantism became associated with a colonizing alien force, and Catholicism became a symbol of dispossession. The problems surrounding mixed marriages in Ireland, therefore, stem not only from theological objections, but also from perceived political affiliations. Indeed, because religion and politics in Ireland have been inextricably bound up together, such relationships often concurrently transgress social and political lines. In Ireland, most mixed marriage disputes have centered on the religious upbringing of the children of the union where the Catholic church and the state held potentially conflicting positions. Civil law long dictated that the father had an absolute right to decide on the religious upbringing and education of his children, a principle known as “paternal supremacy” and a relic of old English civil law. In contrast, the Catholic church insisted that children of mixed marriages should be brought up as Catholics, irrespective of the faith to which either parent belonged. The disputes examined in this article, all of which came before the Irish courts, shed light not only on the fraught relationship between the Catholic church and state in terms of mixed marriages, but also establish how the outcome of one such dispute, the Tilson case in 1950, irrevocably changed the civil law position on the religious upbringing of children. This judgment, by relying on the relevant articles of the 1937 Constitution, ended the centuries-old tradition of paternal supremacy. From the Catholic church’s perspective, however, the ruling was irrelevant; that denomination steadfastly maintained its position regarding the religious upbringing of children of mixed marriages.