Help translating Latin

Kate:

I will see if I can get a vounteer who knows Latin more than I do. I think the record is indicating that a dispensation was granted for the marriage due to fourth degree of consanguinity, basically they were third cousins.

Roger McDonnell

Roger asked me to look at the passage in order to check what he thought it said, but he had already figured it out correctly.  The notation says that the couple had received a dispensation to marry, despite being within four degrees of consanguinity.  This was not uncommon in rural parts of Ireland, where many people whose families had been in the area for a very long time were related (at least distantly) to a lot of the other people in the area.  In the Middle Ages, the church would not allow marriage within seven degrees of consanguinity, but that was shortened to four later on, mostly because the nobility had trouble finding mates, since they were so few and were heavily interelated.  The method of calculating prohibited degrees of consangunity was also changed.  Originally, one counted up to the common ancestor and then down to the proposed spouse, but that was changed so that one calculated consanguinity by counting only back to the common ancestor.  In this case, the priest has recited the calculation as consanguinity "in quarto et quarto" ("in four and four").  I'm not certain, but that presumably means counting up four degrees to the common ancestor, then down four degrees to the proposed spouse.  By my calculation, the spouses would thus be third cousins of one another. If they'd been fourth cousins, or even third cousins once removed, then they would presumably not have required the dispensation.