K. of C.'s 49th

Before a hillside altar at French Lick, Ind. last week, kneeling while Bishop John A. Floersh of Louisville celebrated a solemn pontifical field Mass, were 550 delegates to the 49th annual convention of the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus. Representing 61 State councils, 2,565 subordinate councils and more than 600,000 members, the Supreme Council meets annually, reports on the year's work. Ever proud of its charitable doings, it told how it had maintained an employment bureau in its home city, New Haven, Conn., recording 43,128 placements during the last year. In three drought-ridden areas--Kentucky, Missouri, Montana--it had aided both members and nonmembers. Biennially the convention elects Supreme officers; last week it re-elected the entire Supreme Council, including (for the third successive term) Supreme Knight Martin Henry Carmody. 59, a lawyer of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Founded with eleven members in New Haven in 1882, K. of C. calls itself a "fraternal benefit society." Any good Catholic may join. Most famed members: Alfred Emanuel Smith, John Jacob Raskob, Senators Thomas James Walsh of Montana and David Ignatius Walsh of Massachusetts, Manhattan Contractor William F. Kenny, great & good friend of "Al" Smith. Insurance at low rates is available to every Knight. The order has an elaborate system of initiations, demands a certain secrecy "unless the interests of State or Church demand" otherwise. Because of this, many ignorant people hate and fear the K. of C. as a subversive organization, believe implicitly in a famed, tingling "great and fake oath" which, they think, binds the Knights to battle Protestantism. In reality the order is mild and charitable: its meetings, with baseball games, dancing, parades, are no more noxious than those of any other U.S. fraternal order.

Pre-eminent American. Next year's convention will be held in Washington. D.C. to celebrate K. of C.'s 50th anniversary. How to give color to such a ceremony? Always a good way is to unveil something. K. of C. has already aided in putting up a memorial to Christopher Columbus in Washington (as well as getting his birthday observed). On its Golden Anniversary, announced Supreme Knight Carmody last week, K. of C. will honor, because of his "preeminence as a great American," the late great James Cardinal Gibbons. In the Manhattan Studio of Sculptor Leo Lentelli now stands a model of a projected statue of the Cardinal, first public monument to be made of him.

Unquestionably the greatest of U. S. churchmen, Cardinal Gibbons was a Renaissance scholar-statesman-priest in a U.S. pioneer background. Born in Baltimore in 1834, he was chaplain to Federal troops during the Civil War. In 1868 he was appointed Missionary Bishop to the new Vicariate Apostolic of North Carolina, never forgot his welcome in Wilmington: a torchlight procession of drunken negroes, exulting in their new freedom. Youngest Bishop in his church at the Vatican Council of 1870, he became Archbishop of Baltimore in 1877, Cardinal in 1886.

An extraordinary mixture of serenity and forcefulness, Cardinal Gibbons became known as a defender of things purely American. His first address as Cardinal (in Rome) was in praise of the U.S. separation of Church and State. He defeated proposals to obtain control, under European leadership, of immigrants to the U.S. He began the movement to canonize Mother Seton, first U.S. candidate for sainthood (TIME, Aug. 3). was a co-founder and first chancellor and board president of the Catholic University of America in Washington. Politically sagacious, he helped adjust the status of his church in Porto Rico and Cuba after the Spanish-American War. During the World War he organized the National Catholic War Council and the National Catholic Welfare Council (now Conference).

Revered almost as a Church Father during the last of his 87 years. Cardinal Gibbons kept himself a public figure until he died in 1921. Stories circulated about him: He visited the Pope, who called him "Jibbons" (TIME, April 13). He was called "the man who never made a mistake." He was the last living American to remember seeing Andrew Jackson (last U.S. general to beat a British army) in the streets of Baltimore. In voluminous garments he used to bathe at Atlantic City with the late Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia. Once an on-looker said: "What a very handsome man [the Archbishop] but what a poor, sickly wife he's got!"

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