Can anybody please explain and clarify the rule on interfaith marriages involving Catholics? For years, I had the understanding that they require dispensations (that fact alone has never changed), and that a requirement for such a thing is that both parties involved promise to raise all prospective children born to the union in the Catholic faith.

The latter is the tricky part: for I learned that it became OFFICIAL in canon law only in 1910, it was strongly resisted in Germany, and in fact the pope had to make an exception there. Otherwise, it has traditionally been a strict requirement: I was told that when it comes to interfaith unions involving a Catholic and a non-Catholic, the Catholic party typically dominates.

Nevertheless, it seems that the insistence on all children being brought up in the Church has been INCONSISTENTLY enforced throughout history: after all, we know about the varying situations involving European royals. Somebody once told me that in Germany, the custom was to have boys follow their father's religion, and girls their mother's.

But I believe that this was only a special case for royal unions in Europe (e.g. Prince Valdemar of Denmark and Princess Marie of Orléans; Grand Duke Guillaume IV of Luxembourg and Infanta Maria of Portugal, who in any case ended up having all daughters).

If anything, I read somewhere that the German custom was actually have all the children brought up in the religion of their fathers: that, in fact, characterized Margaret Majer Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco's mother), born in America to German immigrant parents. Her father, Carl Majer, was indeed a Lutheran; but her mother, Margaretha Berg, was a Catholic. Despite being born in the United States, they imported the German custom.

I would imagine that Alice Toledo (Queen Silvia of Sweden's mother) was Catholic; but her daughter was raised as a Lutheran (otherwise, she could not have easily married King Carl XVI of Sweden, despite the fact that he was already enthroned at the time and free to marry a commoner).

The reason why Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg (as in Operation Valkyrie fame) was raised Catholic seems not so much that his parents' marriage was an interfaith union involving a Catholic and a non-Catholic, but rather that his FATHER was of the faith. The same would apply to his wife, Countess Nina, whose mother (like her mother-in-law) was a Lutheran.

She, in fact, was a third cousin of Prince Philip of Great Britain through that Lutheran mother: one of Nina's great-grandmothers was Countess Anna von Hauke, whose sister Julie became the morganatic wife of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine (from whom the Battenbergs stem).

Anyhow, getting back to the original question: I was just wondering if anybody out there could illuminate on the matter, which is highly confusing. If, in fact, it was the German custom for girls to follow their mother's religion, then the woman known in history as Princess Adelheid Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg (wife of the deposed and exiled King Miguel I of Portugal) would have been brought up as a Lutheran -- not Catholic.