Religion: Inisfada & Mrs. Brady

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Goodness once was viewed as woman's chief end. In a time when women compete with men in politics, business and badness, goodness and piety are seldom seen practiced on a grand scale, or recognized as such by the Press. Moreover, Papal Duchess Brady is shy, extremely apprehensive of publicity. Yet she is the foremost member of her social class in a faith which demands completely public acts of faith of its people. While her husband was living, Mrs. Brady—Dame of Malta, Dame of the Holy Sepulchre, holder of the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice—founded the Carroll Club (for Catholic business girls), visited and gave money to Catholic hospitals, orphanages, homes for the aged. She succeeded Mrs. Herbert Hoover as board chairman of the Girls Scouts of America. Her husband dead (in 1930, leaving her $50,000,000), she accepted Notre Dame's Laetare Medal as the most notable U. S. lay Catholic of 1933, and began thinking of giving "Inisfada" to the Jesuits.

In recent months black-clad Jesuits have been seen about the estate, while a famed Jesuit, Very Rev. William Coleman Nevils, onetime president of Georgetown University, acted as negotiator of details with Mrs. Brady. To North Hills, the village (339 population) in whose boundaries lies the $8,000,000 Brady property, on which it has levied taxes for 16 years, last week's announcement was a shock. In a quandary was the village's Mayor Malcolm Pratt ("Mac") Aldrich.

He, a socialite onetime Yale football captain, could well understand the Brady estate's problem, for he is counsel and manager of the great Edward Stephen Harkness estate. But village feeling triumphed and last week Mayor Aldrich began conferring with the village counsel as to possible legal means of keeping "Inisfada" out of the hands of the non-taxpaying Jesuifs.

Whatever might come of this, Mrs. Brady was finished with "Inisfada," and almost finished with her seven years of widowhood. Fortnight ago she admitted she is engaged to marry the Irish Free State Minister to the Vatican, William J. Babington Macaulay (TIME, Feb. 22). Last week Minister Macaulay left Vatican City, bound for a vacation in the U. S. Whether or not the marriage would be performed, as had been predicted, in Rome by Papal Secretary of State Pacelli, who visited at "Inisfada" last autumn (TIME, Oct. 19 et seq.), performed it soon would be in a manner befitting the mature companionship of a good and gracious lady and a courtly diplomat.