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.

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.

“Bill” Macaulay first met the Bradys when he was a career diplomat in the British Civil Service. Born of a good Irish county family (no kin to British Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay), he transferred to the Irish Free State service when it was set up in 1924 was sent to Washington as secretary, later became counsellor at the Free State Legation. Dark-haired, affable, fond of bridge, Counsellor Macaulay was popular in the quiet set of Mrs. Lawrence Townsend in Washington, sometimes saw-Mrs. Brady at parties. In 1930 he was appointed Free State Consul General in Manhattan, where mutual social circles brought him closer to Mrs. Brady, now a widow who spent her autumns in the U. S.. springs and summers in Italy, Carlsbad, England. Last summer “Bill” Macaulay, an unostentatiously “good”‘ Catholic, was in his third year as Minister to the Vatican and Mrs. Brady was living in Casa del Sole, the villa near the Vatican which Nicholas Brady’ bought years ago. Minister Macaulay asked the woman who had become his friend to be his wife. She reflected, departed for the U. S. and sent him her answer during the ensuing months. Her ”yes,” denied by loyal friends until Mrs. Brady felt ready to admit it, was a surprise to Manhattanites who had seen the two casually together.

The functions of a Minister to the Vatican from a small state like the Irish Free State are pleasant and nominal. Minister Macaulay maintains a friendly interest in the Roman houses of study of Irish orders, pays a formal visit once a week to Secretary of State Pacelli, spends the rest of his time representing his State at Rome’s innumerable parties and church ceremonies. Presumably after his marriage Minister Macaulay will, unless perhaps transferred to Washington as Minister, use his modest Rome legation as an office, and Casa del Sole as his official home. But while his lady will take her place in Papal society, she has promised to spend several months each year attending to her various U. S. causes.