In 1563 the Council of Trent issued the decree Tametsi, designed to outlaw so-called “clandestine” – i.e. undocumented – marriages, common then in many parts of Christian Europe. The late Fr Adrian Hastings, in his masterly report, Christian Marriage in Africa, said he was convinced the decree made a fundamental mistake. Others think so too.  Hastings had been tasked by the Anglican Church in central Africa to look at a range of marriage problems from a historical perspective. And he found that Anglican missionaries, like their Catholic counterparts, were applying the strict Tametsi principles to all sorts of cases for which they were not designed, such as polygamy and customary marriage. The result was widespread confusion, suffering, and, in some cases, alie