Religion: A Cardinal to His Boys

The Knights of Columbus make two broad stipulations for membership: the candidate must be a practical Catholic; he must be opposed to Socialism as an economic system. Some 700,000 Catholic men have fulfilled the requirements, are knights. Last week their delegates met in Boston under Supreme Knight Martin Henry Carmody, 58, Grand Rapids, (Mich.) lawyer.

High lights of the convention were the talks His Eminence William Cardinal O’Connell, oldest (70) and senior of the four U. S. cardinals, gave to “my boys.”

At a mass in his archiepiscopal Cathedral of the Holy Cross he oriented the knights on Puritanism: “The Puritan, it is true, had a hard and harsh sense of duty and of the force of law. It would seem from indications all around us that that sense is growing weaker instead of stronger. The Puritan venerated his religion, such as it was. It would appear from what we see about us that this virtue is not growing in their descendants.”

A choir of knights sang the hymns at the mass, hymns written by Cardinal O’Connell. Later he commented: “I am not particularly proud of my hymns. But I like them. I have heard them sung, well, good, bad and indifferent. But when I heard the choir singing them at the cathedral I said, ‘Really, did I write that? Is that my music?’ I hardly recognized it. I’m very sensitive to music. The only trouble was that it distracted me from Holy Mass. The music was so good I couldn’t close my ears to it.”