Fourth Degree Knights in the 2007 Columbus Day parade in New Haven.

Membership in the Fourth Degree surpassed 305,000 this year, helped along by 306 exemplifications. And we now have 2,797 assemblies around the world, an increase of 54 during this fraternal year. The United States celebrates Columbus Day each October, and in some cities, it’s a prime opportunity for a public event featuring Fourth Degree Knights.

This past October, our home city of New Haven, Connecticut staged a big parade, featuring retiring Supreme Secretary Bob Lane as the Grand Marshal.

And in Washington, D.C., the Fourth Degree turned out in large numbers, as they always do, for a ceremony at the statue of Christopher Columbus which stands in front of Washington’s Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol building.

In 1954, after a three-year campaign, the Knights of Columbus persuaded the U.S. Congress to add the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. In 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a challenge to these words in the Pledge from a California atheist on a technicality. In a matter of months, he had filed a new lawsuit, and this time we asked the federal court to allow us to join the suit as “defendant intervenors.” The judge agreed, and today the suit is entitled “Newdow v. Carey,” because one of the individual Knights who stepped forward and agreed to be named in the suit is John Carey, and he and his family were there in the courtroom in San Francisco back in December when the case was argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

	California Knight John Carey (left), his family and attorney Kevin Hasson after arguments on the Pledge of Allegiance at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

We’re still waiting for a decision in the California case. But in the meantime, the same atheist has filed another suit – this one in New Hampshire, and in January of this year we were again allowed to intervene in that case.

And so we’ve sent a firm message: no matter where you go, trying to take “God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Knights of Columbus will be there.

During Pope Benedict’s historic visit to the United States, he made a point of praising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights during his speech at the United Nations in New York. Just two weeks later, the Knights of Columbus and the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See cosponsored a forum in Rome on the issue of human rights in Latin America.

The meeting brought together senior Vatican diplomats and academics from throughout the Western Hemisphere to discuss the significant contribution that Latin American countries played in the drafting of the Declaration sixty years ago this year.

We will be supporting other Rome conferences with the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican.