ABSTRACT

Marriage law reform assumed great prominence in the work of modernizing Italian legislation, which, initiated by the Fascist-led government beginning in 1923, gradually invested all sectors of the legal system; and this was mainly as a result of the Lateran Concordat of 1929, which had recognized civil effects to Catholic religious marriage. Although the Fascist government was committed to a gradual alignment of the civil legal system with the canonical code in the so-called res mixtae, the proposals inherent in the new discipline on marriage aroused an intense debate that-particularly around the question of recognizing generative impotence as a cause of nullity-occurred on several occasions in the 1930s in the pages of the leading journals of ecclesiastical law. The essay aims to reconstruct its essential features through the most significant contributions of practitioners and scholars from the two branches of law involved.