Key facts of the case – The applicant is a woman who considered the civil court’s declaration of ceasing of the concordatarian marriage’s legal effects (divorce) as a breach of her constitutional right to religious freedom, on the basis of her religious belief that marriage is indissoluble and the circumstance that, at the time of its celebration, her former husband also shared this belief.

Main reasoning of the court – The judges have first stated that, by the signing of the 1984 Concordat, the State did not mean to regulate marriage as it is regulated by Canon Law (thus prescribing the indissolubility of marriage), but it merely recognised legal effects to religious marriages celebrated according to the Catholic rite, without renouncing its competence as far as the regulation of the temporal limits of such legal effects is concerned.
Secondly, the ceasing of the concordatarian marriage’s legal effects does not affect the applicant’s belonging to the Catholic Church and does not infringe her religious belief that marriage is indissoluble. Thirdly, the religious beliefs held by her former spouse at the time of the celebration of the marriage are irrelevant.