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Tertullian writes that matrimonial unions contracted without the intervention of ecclesiastical authority are liable to be judged tantamount to fornication and adultery (De pudicitia, iv, in Migne, P.L., II, 987). Ignatius intimates how men and women about to marry should enter wedlock with the bishop’s consent, so that their marriage may be in the Lord (Ante-Nicene Fathers, I, 100). In the fifth chapter of his Epistle to Polycarp, St. That this sentence strikes the keynote of unending antipathy on the part of the Church towards clandestine marriages can be gathered by a brief review of the historical attitude of the Church. While upholding the validity of clandestine marriages “as long as the Church does not annul them”, the council asserts that “for weighty reasons the holy Church of God always abhorred and prohibited them” (Sess. The decree reads: “Those who attempt to contract matrimony otherwise than in the presence of the parish priest or of another priest with leave of the parish priest or of the ordinary, and before two or three witnesses, the Holy Synod renders altogether incapable of such a contract, and declares such contracts null and void.” The Council of Trent did not transmit any historical record of this question. i) to invalidate marriages contracted at variance with the exigencies of the decree “ Tametsi“, commonly so called because the first word of the Latin text is tametsi. Clandestinity (in CANON LAW).-Strictly speaking, clandestinity signifies a matrimonial impediment introduced by the Council of Trent (Sess.