TIME and the Jesuits

Sir / You amaze me, TIME! Your skillful job of pulse-taking and diagnosis on a sprawling and still-kicking patient fills me with envy. Now we will know where to turn for information about the Jesuits [April 23]. How about a merger?

GORDON GEORGE, S.J. Director Jesuit Information Office Rome

Sir / If the Jesuits are in trouble, things can only be looking up for the Catholic Church. The Jesuits have never been, are not now and hopefully never will be Catholicism's "front fine." They have long been, are now and probably always will be Catholicism's continuing embarrassment.

J. PATRICK DUGAN Bethesda, Md.

Sir / The Jesuits, like other factions within the church, are running blindly first in one direction, then the other. It is a helter-skelter rush past the actual problems besieging the human race. What is amazing is the polyglot of practices and beliefs attributed to the strikingly simple philosophy of one man--Jesus.

(MRS.) CAROLYN ALBERT Lewiston, Me.

Sir / Congratulations to TIME for roaming over four centuries and five continents to develop its cover story on the Jesuits. Your quote of John Cqgley's line about "Jesuits left and Jesuits right" and your reference to Nixon Aide John McLaughlin's having been an associate editor of America reminded me that Congressman Robert Drinan was on the same magazine's masthead as a contributing editor (1956-70).

DONALD R. CAMPION, S.J. Editor in Chief, America New York City

Sir / Accustomed as I am to flip treatments of religious topics in the secular press, I was pleasantly astounded by your perceptive, collage-like distillation of the struggles and spirit of the Society of Jesus yesterday and today.

I am a 29-year-old Jesuit who will be ordained to the priesthood this June. If I had five more lives to lead, they would all be in the Society of Jesus.

RICHARD TOMASEK, S.J. Cambridge, Mass.

Sir / You succeeded in depicting the Society not as it is, but as it is striving to be.

J.F.X. SHEEHAN, S.J. Marquette University Milwaukee

Sir / This evening, after reading "The Jesuits' Search for a New Identity," I attended the funeral Mass of one of my old teachers, Father Robert Manning, S.J.

During that peaceful interlude I had an opportunity to reflect on your article, and it seemed to me that in emphasizing the order's spectacular members, of whom there have always been a few, you missed the essence of the Jesuits, the contribution made by the hundreds of Robert Mannings who, through the quiet force of intellect and an unassuming devotion to their vows, have exerted a good influence on an incalculable number of young lives, an influence that can last a lifetime and is frequently passed along to succeeding generations.

As long as we have enough Mannings to teach the young, we need not worry about the acrobats and the tightrope walkers who attract the headlines. They will pass, and the schoolmen will endure.

ROBERT A. RYAN Cincinnati

Second Thoughts About Science

Sir / "Reaching Beyond the Rational" was thoughtprovoking. It has always been assumed that science and mysticism are irreconcilable opposites. But can it be that what we term "science" and "mysticism" are only two small aspects of a universal whole and that we have merely discovered the surface manifestations of each?

(MRS.) BETTY WASSER Bellevue, Wash.

Sir / If it were not for modern science and technology, the world would not be in the mess it is in. It would be in some other kind of mess.

GEORGE BARTLETT Los Angeles

Sir / One word in favor of science: science did not put Galileo on trial, nor did it burn anyone at the stake. Science has never forced anyone into a hopelessly dogmatic position. Skepticism is the essence of science, and it takes faith and courage to be a skeptic.

If there is a world beyond the rational, it is still the scientific approach that will prove its existence.

LYA ROSENSTEIN Sioux Falls, S. Dak.

Sir / "Reaching Beyond the Rational" should serve well to debunk the all too pervasive myth held by laymen that the scientific community is in possession of some fundamental and absolute knowledge about the world we live in. In a contingent universe, damn little is impossible. Thus if God is indeed not playing dice with the universe, it is at least clear that we do not know what exactly he is doing with it.

DAVID A. RIDGELY Williamsburg, Va.

Sir / I do not hold several of the views attributed to me. I do not believe that a breach in elementary physical laws is imminent. Nor do I think that psychic transmissions may one day be linked to undiscovered elementary particles. If psychic phenomena exist, it is likely that they will be explicable within known science, or rational extensions of it. As for immortality, what I have said is that we may increase the human life span through advances in biology, an example of the ordinary rational processes of science.

GERALD FEINBERG Professor of Physics Columbia University New York City

Sir / The "Second Thoughts About Man" essays, and in particular the last one, "Reaching Beyond the Rational" [April 23], have been the highlight of the magazine, lifting TIME out of the mediocrity in which most weeklies wallow.

LILI STERN Lexington, Mass.

Topplers and the Toppled

Sir / You write that "Ngo Dinh Diem and his ambitious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were toppled in a 1963 coup that had active U.S. encouragement" [April 2]. Well, perhaps "toppled" is not so bad a word to choose for "murdered," though it would be more accurately applied to the fate of Louis XVI and Charles I, who certainly lost their "tops." (You do not mention a third brother, the Governor of Hue, who took refuge in the U.S. Consulate and was handed over by the American authorities to his "topplers." The fourth brother, an archbishop, was, luckily for himself, in Rome, though President Kennedy might have had scruples in toppling a member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Did it ever occur to him that he who lives by toppling will die by toppling?)

Now there is another word, insurgent, which you use to describe the opponents of Lon Nol in Cambodia, who was himself surely an "insurgent," with American aid, against the neutral Prince Sihanouk. Perhaps it is time that Lon Nol was "toppled."

GRAHAM GREENE Antibes, France

Checkers Rides Again

Sir / Watergate [April 30]: it's enough to make Checkers roll over in his grave.

CHARLES A. DANA JR. New York City

Sir / As an American, I feel as though criminal brutes had come in and poisoned every growing thing in my garden, destroyed my house and almost mortally done in my mind and spirit.

ELIZABETH ROSE Laguna Beach, Calif.

Sir / Sherman Adams was a choirboy!

BILL DIFFLEY Kirkwood, Mo.

Sir / The Democrats just couldn't stomach the defeat Richard Nixon plastered them with in the elections last November, and the Watergate incident was the only club they could readily grab to beat him over the head with in retaliation.

LEO N. PARKER California City, Calif.

Catholic Soap Opera

Sir / I read with some shock that the producers of the soap opera The Secret Storm [April 2] had consulted with the Archdiocese of New York. The fact is that no members of the Columbia Broadcasting System ever consulted with the archdiocese regarding "Father Mark Reddin's romantic life." We are not attempting to explain the problems of confused clerics through the medium of a soap opera.

MSGR. EUGENE V. CLARK Director Office of Communications Archdiocese of New York New York City

Unreal Shortage

Sir / I will believe the gasoline shortage [April 16] is genuine only when the Government acts to limit the size of automobiles. Until then I have to conclude the problem isn't real.

SHERMAN SIEGEL King of Prussia, Pa.

The Language Barrier

Sir / I am writing to comment on your story about American medical students abroad [April 16]. We need more American doctors here in our own country. My mother suffered and died from a stroke last year in a hospital in upstate New York. We could not understand the foreign doctors who tried to speak to us about her condition. All in all it was a miserable experience.

MARY JO HEATON New York City

Teen-Age Pay

Sir / I am opposed to the "McDonald's plan" [April 23], under which teen-agers would receive a lower hourly wage than adults would for the same job. One's age is not the only determinant of one's ability to do a job well. Unless the plan's proponents can demonstrate why a teen-ager's job performance automatically deserves less money than an adult's, I suggest they come up with more equitable proposals.

SUSAN B. GOLDBERG Chestnut Hill. Mass.

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