Prayers and a punch-up
‘‘He smacked my wife on the face with his hand’’ John Whyte
A Black Lives Matter t-shirt sparked a fist fight on the steps of a small town New Zealand church. The strange fracas in the rolling green hills of Te Kuiti as the United States roils in race protests thousands of miles away shows how deep American-style culture wars have seeped into Kiwi lives.
Alone voice startles a congregation at prayer in a Te Ku¯ iti church. It shatters the unconscious silence parishioners kneel within, heads bowed, hands clasped – and into which another man reads a bible passage aloud.
‘‘Why are you wearing such an offensive T-shirt to mass you fool!’’ comes the demand.
They shake their heads. How strange to interrupt a reading. Perhaps it’s a one-off.
The reader pushes on through the fine print until he reaches the solace of a full-stop and can utter his closing refrain – Lord hear our prayer.
But as he makes towards the pew he’s interrupted again.
‘‘Buffoon!’’ an icy-moustached man from Benneydale called Leo Leitch, yells.
Fellow Catholics John Whyte and his wife Jess wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts to church that Sunday in December 2019.
They believe in the cause, but never expected the trouble.
After the service, congregants mingle outside for a chit-chat, but Leitch wants answers.
He claims the parish priest at the time, Father Matt McAuslin, congratulated him on his outburst and shares his views about Black Lives Matter.
‘‘The parish priest said to me, us three are probably the only ones who know the truth about Black Lives Matter.’’
McAuslin encouraged Leitch to question Whyte about the T-shirt, but to leave him out of it, Leitch claims.
‘‘So I went up to him and demanded to know why he was wearing such an offensive T-shirt to mass.’’
Whyte was shocked by Leitch’s ‘‘screeds of vindictiveness’’.
‘‘My response was I know why I’m wearing the T-shirt, I’m not sure why you’re abusing a reader while doing a reading,’’ Whyte says. The argument escalates. Whyte says Leitch pushed passed a person standing between them, prompting a warning from him to back off.
‘‘He used one hand to push my chest which I found to be quite an aggressive response, and then he smacked my wife on the face with his hand,’’ Whyte says.
This is what caused Whyte to push back, with what he says was a single ‘‘shove’’.
Leitch agrees that he walked towards Whyte and challenged him twice, but says he was the one met with a ‘‘flurry of punches’’ to the head by both Whyte and his wife.
Whatever the case, no-one is seriously injured as elderly bystanders throw themselves in to hold the scuffling parties apart.
Both Whyte and Leitch spoke to the police, but the incident was left where it was, on the church steps.
While Whyte strongly supports Black Lives Matter, he is not keen to speak to Stuff further and wants to forget the fracas.
‘‘Although I expect that will not be an easy thing to do,’’ he says.
‘‘Never in my wildest dreams would I expect wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt to mass in Te
Ku¯ iti would result in this.’’
But experts studying the impact of extremist views aren’t so surprised such things are beginning to make themselves felt even in the quietest of places.
As people entrench in increasingly disparate online realities, it’s only going to get worse, they say.
Leitch sits at his kitchen table one brooding, late summer’s morning, explaining why he believes Black Lives Matter is an ‘‘evil organisation’’.
Religious iconography is peppered throughout the house: a crucifix at the doorway, Mary in the kitchen, Pope John Paul II on the living-room side table.
Leitch’s house looks like it used to be a corner-store, blue-rimmed, lacy drapes, upright against a sky that rolls about like corrugated iron.
He lives in Benneydale, a lonely King Country settlement hanging off State Highway 30.
Last year, residents defended the pride of its English name: a combination of two government mining officials in the 1940s – Charlie Benney and Tom Dale.
Later, road signs with the town’s recently added Ma¯ori name – Maniaiti – were defaced by grey and black spray paint.