Places and Persons
Williams, Michael
Places and Persons NICHOLAS FREDERIC BRADY: R. I. P. By MICHAEL WILLIAMS CARDINAL HAYES, standing at the open door of the sanctuary of the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola, surrounded by many...
...She would do so no doubt even over the body of Dives, damned because he ignored Lazarus in the dust before the door of his palace...
...As for the rest of her children-well, she hopes, she labors, and she prays...
...The congregation stood with bowed heads...
...but among them were those who perhaps had better reasons to bow their heads and say their prayers than those who occupied the seats of the mighty...
...The bearers of the dead slowly paced toward the street...
...Nicholas Frederic Brady tended toward that ideal of a Catholic man of great wealth and vast power which if or when achieved would do so much to realize the economic and sociological teachings of the Church, as proclaimed in modern times (but not as anything new: simply as a reaffirmation of age-old principles) by Leo XIII and his successors...
...Not, indeed, from all our work, but from that part of our work which he could not approve...
...Catholic things are always begun that way: in and through charity...
...Communists and Socialists, of course, would not, for they could not, recognize the fact-yet fact nevertheless it was-that Mr...
...But those times were vital moments in which revelations of character were made...
...Garbed in the historic costume of his papal rank, in company with an admiral of the United States Navy, and a general of the United States Army, and a Mandarin of China, he was bearing the canopy above the blessed Sacrament in the marvelous procession at Mundelein when cardinals and scores of bishops and thousands of priests and representatives of all the Catholic societies and orders, clerical and lay, marched through a frightful tempest of thunder and lightning and drenching rain: marched without a break in the ranks, without faltering, without confusion, like the great army of the Church militant marching down the ages amid all the storms that have ever crashed about and against it...
...something intangible that might become something tangible in the future, but which could not be recognized by many at that time as anything other than "one more Catholic paper -and we already have too many Catholic papers...
...for when charity does not act as midwife and nurse to a Catholic thing, soon it will die, even if it has been born with a silver or golden spoon in its mouth...
...but rich men who do not use at least some of their money for the common weal (obviously I do not speak now of this journal...
...But when we were able to say, "Mr...
...it was judgment in action, justice and rectitude expressing themselves...
...And at that time there was nothing to show, there was no journal, there was no Calvert Associates, there was only a dream: there was merely an idea, not to say an ideal, to be sketched in words...
...but yet I was a beggar, asking for alms to start this journal, asking any and all who I thought might help to do so...
...Of his private life, his religious devotion, his capacity for standing the test of manhood, which is fidelity to friends, it is not for me to speak...
...Brady would wish to leave them, unrecorded, save in the hearts of those who have the right to know of them...
...But I have heard many stories of that inner life-but I leave them as Mr...
...Many others were lowlier folk...
...He did not shrink from Lazarus: he remembered that Fatherhood of God in which Lazarus and Dives are brothers, however often this or that Dives may lamentably forget the everlasting fact...
...So with sad confidence the Cardinal said: "May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace...
...They seek wealth, yes, and often inordinately...
...The next time I saw and talked with Nicholas Brady was in Chicago during the Eucharistic Congress...
...It was one of those actions which command respect...
...He admitted that the intention that informed this particular activity was meant to be for the good of the nation and of the Church, but his judgment was that the intention was being badly served, perhaps frustrated, by the action based upon it...
...Brady, as I have said, was a quiet man...
...His was the stewardship, not the absolute ownership, of wealth...
...Austere, reserved, quiet, with keen, rather ironical eyes, he listened, rarely speaking...
...Among the little group of writers and college professors who were keeping the dream alive, at that time, there were many discussions about rich men...
...The Preface for the Mass for the Dead contains the most explicit promises of the Church as to the everlasting life which can be realized, in part, even in this passing life of ours...
...It was, as were all his actions which I at least had opportunities to observe, the natural action of a natural aristocrat, a member of that one and only true-born aristocracy which always has and always will -in all societies not utterly corrupt or disordered- set the pace of life and strike its best and highest human note...
...Americans-as that keen and somewhat caustic observer of American life, Mr...
...Brady well...
...And his name: the name of one who unquestionably was the most influential Catholic layman of our country, made a tremendous difference...
...He did not call the tune: never did he interfere with our editorial policy-never, indeed, did any of the rich men who one by one came in time to believe in our dream, and applied the power that was theirs to the movement that was ours...
...I cannot claim that I knew Mr...
...Lazarus, she knows to be safe, to be happy, to be confirmed in life eternal...
...Brady again...
...For a quarter of a century, from the time when as a young man he shouldered the heavy weight of his father's vast estate, he steadily kept in mind, and according to his best lights consistently worked for, the best interests of labor as well as capital...
...We of this paper have said enough, I think-perhaps, in our zeal, at times too much, because inopportunely-concerning the really awful responsibility of rich men, particularly Catholic rich men, toward the mass of society, toward those from whose labors proceed so much of the wealth amassed by the capable, or sometimes the merely fortunate men (and, alas, at times, the unscrupulous self-seekers) who dominate society today...
...In seven years I met him only a few times...
...When he did speak, it was to ask questions which pierced to the very vitals of the subject...
...I can only repeat, I trust with sincerity, the words of the prayer chanted by the choir as the coffin on which rested the cross was borne away: "Mayest thou have eternal rest with Lazarus, who was poor...
...But he marched with a smile, calm and self-possessed: doing his duty then as he always did his duty by his immense and far-flung industrial and financial responsibilities: by his great but little-known charities, and his unostentatious and important services to his secular alma mater, Yale, and to his spiritual mother, the Catholic Church...
...do not win public respect...
...is not her favorite flower the rose...
...But Nicholas Brady knew, as all reasonable people know, that organized charity does not always deserve the blistering blame of John Boyle O'Reilly: that many forms of it are useful and good and necessary: so he sent his checks...
...Hilaire Belloc, has truthfully pointed out-are freer than most peoples from the mere idolatry of wealth...
...he was doing a beautiful thing in appropriate material, for is not Saint Teresa the "Little Flower...
...Places and Persons NICHOLAS FREDERIC BRADY: R. I. P. By MICHAEL WILLIAMS CARDINAL HAYES, standing at the open door of the sanctuary of the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola, surrounded by many bishops, prelates and priests, traced the last sign of the cross above the bier on which rested the body of Nicholas Frederic Brady-duke of the Vatican state, and member of the Ordine Supreme del Christo, papal position of honor held only by one other man, the king of Italy...
...Men like Nicholas Brady build up character as well as riches...
...Then he spoke again, to give us his support, the use of his name, a generous gift of his money...
...The last gust of incense faded pungently...
...dead at the age of fifty-one...
...If he chose rose marble as the material out of which a sculptor was to carve a statue of Saint Teresa of Lisieux to be given to the Pope, it was not the mere gesture of a rich man to whom rose marble or porphyry was purchasable as clay...
...The tall yellow tapers flickered above the empty bier, and upon the black-hung altar...
...Here was a rich man who like other rich Americans bought things from artists: but unlike so many of these rich men he understood the values, he appreciated the technical elements of creative art...
...I lunched with him, and of many topics discussed I recall most vividly one, in which I was out of my depth: the theme of art...
...But he gave also of his own time, his own energy, his own heart and soul to the widows and the orphans, to the crippled and the sick, to the down and out, to the man whose labor is his only wealth...
...I write only of what I know: of what I see and hear and think as I pass through this adventurous, this thrilling human life of ours...
...But Nicholas Frederic Brady did not wait for death to remember Lazarus...
...But Nicholas Brady paid the piper, and changed the tune...
...So without fuss, quietly and firmly as he did everything, he disassociated himself from this phase of our work: he withdrew his support from it...
...On this third occasion, without taking any, even the slightest advantage of his benefactions to The Commonweal, or seeking to mold or dominate its editorial policy, he found himself in dis-agreeement with a particular phase of its work...
...and is not her own character firmer and more perdurable even than the most solid and lasting marble ? Later that day, I saw Mr...
...Brady, and realized one more phase of his character, before I stood among the throng in Saint Ignatius and heard the choir chant: "Mayest thou have eternal rest with Lazarus, who was a poor man...
...So at such moments she breathes forth plaintively yet hopefully the same aspiration over the body of a multimillionaire as over the bones of a pauper...
...For we poor men needed the rich men to put power into the dynamo of our dream: for wealth is power: for evil or for good...
...I remember him so well on the occasion I myself first knocked at his door to beg...
...Many of them were men who are among the best-known leaders of Church and state and bench and bar and of high finance...
...Brady was a true friend of organized labor, as well as of the unorganized individual working-man ground in the mill of economic hardship...
...Brady is with us," how much easier it was to reach and move others...
...Once again did I encounter Mr...
...For the Church knows that Lazarus, who once was poor, is now wealthy with that wealth which does not lessen or pass away, and that he eternally rests in that peace and life which cannot be disturbed or ended...
...And justly so...
...Then the choir sang the concluding words of the funeral service...
...For it says: "Unto Thy faithful, O Lord, Life is changed, not taken away, and the abode of this earthly sojourn being dissolved, an eternal dwelling is prepared...
...This stewardship had been placed in his hands in his youth: a heavy weight, a greater responsibility than wealth itself- for if it be harder for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle, surely it is so because in life so many of the rich do not think of Lazarus: or if they do, they merely send, now and then, after a sufficient number of form letters or telephone calls have exerted the high pressure salesmanship of professional philanthropy, a check to some form of "organized charity, scrimped and iced, in the name of a cautious, statistical Christ...
...I was not precisely a Lazarus...
...The same words are sung or said above the coffin of all who are given Catholic burial...
...And the final words of the liturgy-the divine action of the Church- chanted in those Gregorian tones which issue from the unknown depths of time and of religious emotion, were as follows: "Mayest thou have eternal rest with Lazarus, who was poor...
...And when so many rich men refused to recognize the Lazarus-dream begging at their doors, we would keep our spirits going with a song, of which I give an expurgated version: With a thorny and blistering switch, We desire to pummel the rich- But it is not the fashion, So alas we can't cash-in- Anyhow, may they all get the itch...
...also a multimillionaire, and one of the first five or six most influential financiers of America...
...Although I was almost totally unknown to him, he received me, and gave me of his time...
...The family followed...
...It would not be true to say that it made all the difference because there were other men of power who joined the group who launched the Catholic lay movement of which this journal is the organ, without whom it could not have started, nor continued...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 24
