Luther never had taken his own nor other monks’ vows lightly.  He spoke and wrote to Melanchthon from the Wartburg against the mere throwing off of the vows on the ground that they were not binding anyway.  He argued the sacredness of the oath, and held that first the consciences of those bound by vows must be set free through the evangelical teaching; then, when they are qualified to make an intelligent choice on spiritual grounds, they may discard their vows.  When he married Catherine, he had long become a free man in his mind.  So had Catherine.

Luther is charged with having entertained a purely secular view of the essence of marriage.  It is true that Luther repudiated the Catholic view of the sacramental character of matrimony.  By the teaching of the Roman Church a legal marriage can be effected only by the ratification of the marriage-promise and the blessing spoken over the couple by a consecrated priest, who thus, by his official quality, imparts to the marriage which he solemnizes a sacred character.  In Luther’s days it was held that “the Church alone properly had jurisdiction over the question of marriage, and the canonical laws (of the Church) included civil as well as spiritual affairs.  Luther repudiated these canonical laws on the subject of marriage, and separated its civil from its ecclesiastical aspect.  He maintained that marriage, as the basis of all family rights, lies entirely within the province of the State, and mast be regulated of necessity by the civil government.  ‘Marriage and the married state,’ he declared in his Traubuechlein (10, 721), ’are civil matters, in the management of which we priests and ministers of the Church must not intermeddle.  But when we are required, either before the church, or in the church, to bless the pair, to pray over them, or even to marry them, then it is our bounden duty to do so.’” (Waring, p. 221.)

In 1906, a papal decree was published which declares any betrothal or marriage entered into by a Catholic with a Catholic, or by a Catholic with a non-Catholic, to be valid only on condition that either the betrothal or the marriage take place in the presence or with the sanction of a Catholic priest This decree is known as the Ne Temere decree.  It is called thus according to a custom prevailing in the Catholic Church by which the official deliverances of the Popes are cited by giving the initial word, or words, of such a deliverance.  The two Latin terms Ne Temere are a warning against reckless action, and the reckless action intended is the one indicated above.

We quote a few statements from the Ne Temere decree, from the work of Dr. Leitner of Passau, which was issued in its fifth edition at Regensburg in 1908.  Dr. Leitner is a Catholic professor at Passau and bears the title “Doctor of Theology and Canon Law.”  Dr. Leitner’s book is in German:  Die Verlobungs- und Eheschliessungsform nach dem Dekrete Ne Temere, which means, “The Form