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True, Lockheed is a great company, and much of the credit belongs to Chairman Gross and his dynamic executives [Feb. 11]. You say the chairman is a banker turned supersalesman and that the president and vice president were accountants who became brilliant administrators. But it takes more than salesmen and administrators to produce technological triumphs. Oh yes, you did say: "Engineers and scientists constitute a third of Lockheed's work force."
CHRISTOS T. CHRISTY
President
Engineers-Scientists Guild
Lockheed Section
Burbank, Calif.
Sir: About your story on Courtland Gross, I raised half of that $40,000 to buy the company out of receivership in 1932, at the bottom of the depression, and served as a director during the formative years. As a close personal friend of Bob Gross from childhood, may I add that only a genius could play second fiddle to his inspiring brother all those years—and in the end rise to greater heights.
MAJOR GENERAL LAWRENCE C. AMES
U.S.A.F. (Ret.)
Oakland, Calif.
Stress & Distress
Sir:
TIME'S discussion of clerical celibacy [Feb. 18] has done a great service by bringing into the open a festering sore in the structure of the church. Celibacy as a sine qua non for the priesthood of the Latin Rite is a product neither of the demands of faith nor of the conclusions of sound theology. The stress on celibacy in Western Catholicism at times borders on the irrational. The Oriental Church has realized the error of identifying a vocation to the priesthood with a vocation to the celibate life.
(THE REV.) ROGER J. MOAG
Catholic Student Center
U.S.L. Campus
Lafayette, La.
Sir:
As a married Roman Catholic layman, I have always felt that I should much prefer to receive marital guidance from a married priest. I firmly believe that clerical celibacy should be a matter of choice, not a requirement for ordination. Matrimony is considered a sacrament by Roman Catholics. Why deprive our priests of its many graces?
DONALD E. COLOGNE
Smith town, N.Y.
Sir: Your treatment of celibacy is misleading, superficial and one-sided. You cite exceptional cases to show that the celibate priesthood is falling apart. You should realize that the church's situation in South America is anything but favorable. What you attribute to some priests there may be one of many symptoms of a more widespread disease infecting South America's Christianity. Perhaps in South America many priests "who found celibacy no problem were either emotionally immature or latent homosexuals." But don't imply that this is so everywhere.
JOHN J. BUCKLEY JR.
Archdiocesan Seminary Cardinal
Glennon College
St.Louis
Sir: A priest who seeks solution of his problems in marriage betrays an immature appreciation of what marriage is about. Marriage is not a solution; it is a vocation, wherein persons give themselves totally to form a new creation. The celibate is capable of the greatest fulfillment because the possibility of devoting himself to many rather than to one is uniquely his.
(THE REV.) STEPHEN F. DUFFY
St. Augustine's Rectory
Union City, N.J.
'Taint Necessarily So