DIVORCE TOO EASY

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12185, 9 July 1925, Page 8

DIVORCE TOO EASY

U.S. CHURCHMEN CALL A HALT MOVE TO FORBID REMARRIAGE BISHOPS UNFIT TO JUDGE By Telegraph.—Frees Assn. —Copyright Australian and N Cebis Association. NEW YORK, July 6. The Sanctity of Marriage Association headed by the bishops metropolitan of the district, has inaugurated a movement to bar absolutely the marriage of divorced persons in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and is petitioning the

general convention of the church to be held at New .Orleans in October, for the repeal of the proviso of the divorce canon allowing the innocent party to remarry. The grounds of the appeal are that the permission is unscriptural and contrary to the practice of the Earlv Christian Church. The petition says that half a century of experience with the > fatal proviso has proved it to be an ever ready wedge for collusion, fraud, falsehood, and the despair of honourable judges. In the opinion of many judges at least half of all the divorces granted are probably fraudulent or collusive, and 80 or 90 per cent, are granted in default, without defence. It is impossible for bishops, unskilled in law and without secular powers, to form a right judgment in such cases. The census reports of the United States, with 48 oodes and 52 causes for divorce, show the most rapid increase in divorce in any country, pagan or Christian, in the world.