Religion: Inisfada & Mrs. Brady

Twenty miles out from Manhattan on the wooded, hilly North Shore of Long Island, inland from Manhasset, lies a great and famed 225-acre estate, on a road locally called ''The Irish Channel" from the origin of several large landowners along it. Behind massive iron gates, looming almost as large as the late Otto Kahn's huge chateau down near Huntington, stands a rambling, many-chimneyed Tudor house whose four stories and So rooms contain $2,000,000 worth of the world's greatest paintings, tapestries, porcelains and a large, handsome private chapel. Last week the public learned that next May it may pay admission—for charity—to inspect the house, the wooded walks, the unsurpassed rose gardens of "Inisfada." home of the late great Roman Catholic Utilities Tycoon, Nicholas Frederic Brady. After the contents of the mansion are sold at auction, "Inisfada" will become the property of the Society of Jesus, to be used as a "house of studies" for young men of that order.

To the black-cassocked Jesuits, who more than any other Catholic fathers are at home in the drawing rooms of the rich and great, the acquisition of "Inisfada" was almost routine. Though they enjoy no personal property, many Jesuits work and study in places like the vast Massachusetts estate of the late W. E. D. Stokes, and in the hotel at West Baden, Ind. which the late Edward Ballard gave them. To the giver-away of "Inisfada" and its treasures, Mrs. Genevieve Garvan Brady, the decision she made public last week marked a definite turning point in an unusual life.

Genevieve Garvan of Hartford, Conn., comely sister of Francis Patrick Garvan (Chemical Foundation), in 1906 married Nicholas Brady, son of a family whose transit and utilities fortune at one time was among the greatest in the U. S. To them both, their wealth became a means by which to serve their Church. In 1920 a Cardinal, His Eminence Giovanni Bonzano, Apostolic Delegate to the U. S., dedicated "Inisfada." The Bradys, indifferent to decorators, had spent 20 years traveling the world buying furnishings for it. Tycoon Brady, who confessed his sins in his last years to a bishop, his friend the Most Rev. John Gregory Murray (now Archbishop of St. Paul), was a trusted lay adviser to the Church, became the second U. S. Catholic named Papal Chamberlain and was made a Papal Duke in 1926, by which time he had given the Vatican more than $1,000,000.