SOMMARIO: 1. La progressiva residualità dell’ipotesi del matrimonio tra minori e i perduranti profili di interesse nella disciplina canonistica – 2. I diritti dei minori nel quadro delle relazioni di famiglia: un ambito più ampio da cui valutare il problema dell’osservanza dei precetti confessionali – 3. Due ipotesi dibattute alla prova dell’applicazione pratica: la tutela penale e i patti tra i coniugi nel procedimento di separazione.

ABSTRACT: The legal protection of specific subjective categories is a traditional issue for international scholars. This kind of argumentative strategy reached a particular relevance after the Second World War, but those normative instruments, considered in an International and Criminal Comparative Law’s point of view, seem probably out-of-date and especially not strictly relevant in the current national Private Law. Nowadays, in the European social system, many traditional cultures support the juridical relevance ( erga omnes ) of their own values and try to apply their constitutive rules to the statute of family and her members. Considering difficult conditions for a legislative response and limited possibilities for a new general discipline (even because these modifications, when eventually approved, created a certain discontent in their practical consequences), the most important solution should be to encourage more inclusive customs not based just on a radical idea of secularism and on a precarious pre-eminence of legislativ