NEWS from one hundred years ago: THE DEVIL’S OWN COUNTRY

A big gathering of Catholics has just met in Greymouth to protest against a new Marriage Law Amendment Bill. Other meetings have been held elsewhere in the country. The marriage reform bill is seen by the church everywhere in the country as an attack on its religious and other cultural rights. New Zealand Catholics and Protestants have been at bitter odds since many of them quarrelled about authority and imperial loyalty in the latter years of the First World War. The new law will make it a crime for anybody to say ‘expressly or by implication’ that couples married in a registry office are ‘not truly and sufficiently married.’ Also the new law will make it a crime for anybody to say that children born of such marriages are ‘illegitimate’ or ‘born out of true wedlock.’ Anglican bishops and some of the laity in other Protestant churches are also unhappy about the bill. Alexander O’Hare, a Catholic priest, tells the Greymouth meeting that the bill will be ‘an unjustifiable and unwarranted interference with religious liberty.’ New Zealand will no longer be ‘God’s Own Country’ but ‘the Devil’s Own Country,’ adds a prominent lawyer, W J Joyce. The bill will soon pass through both houses of parliament and become law.
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Grey River Argus, 24 September 1920