Religion: Catholics at Omaha

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Governor Arthur J. Weaver of Nebraska, Mason, Odd Fellow, Knight of Pythias, Woodman and Elk, and Mayor Richard Lee Metcalfe of Omaha, onetime editorial aide and good friend of the late arch-Protestant William Jennings Bryan, uttered the official welcome; Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backwards) coliseum provided a meeting place—when last week some 5,000 Roman Catholic archbishops, bishops, monsignori, priests and some 25,000 laymen assembled at Omaha for the first National Eucharistic Congress in 19 years. It was the greatest concourse of U. S. Catholics since the International Eucharistic Congress at Chicago four years ago.

The Catholic hierarchy regards Omaha as a towering isle in a sea of Protestantism. Of Nebraska's 1,378,900 population, 160,000 are Roman Catholics—Germans, Irish, Bohemians, Mexicans—living among their Fundamentalist co-citizens. Head of that Catholic archipelago is Bishop Joseph Francis Rummel, host of the Eucharistic Congress.

To Protestant Nebraskans who crowded into Omaha to gawk and wonder, the Congress seemed just what it was, a great convention staged with more splendor than Protestants are wont to marshal. The Most Rev. Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, apostolic delegate at Washington, opened the religious program with a pontifical high mass at St. Cecilia's Cathedral. Archbishop Francis J. L. Beckman of Dubuque preached an emotional sermon. Bishop Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland assembled the Priests' Eucharistic League and admonished the men to greater activities in the propaganda of Catholicism. George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago and U. S. Circuit Judge Martin Thomas Manton of Manhattan addressed tens of thousands in the athletic bowl of Creighton University (Catholic). When all speaking, parading and praying were done and trains were rushing Catholics away from overcrowded Omaha, prelates were well satisfied that they had instilled the general theme of the Congress. That theme: "The Blessed Eucharist, by Divine Institution, the Source and Centre of Christian Life."