Hats off

As a priest ordained in 1943, now "reduced" to the lay state, I heartily commend you for your issue on "Priests: Rethinking Their Role" (July 16) and I salute Msgr. Harry J. Byrne as a supreme symposiarch--as well as a most honest man--for his brilliantly cinematographic "One Man's Vocation." Deftly and poignantly, Byrne limns his experience of celibacy (not "an easy road"), beginning in the seminary and the springtime of his priestly life (when he first became aware that a "woman is another world, another frontier, another possible partner in understanding, work, and faith") through a "seriously considered prospect of marriage" to the "end zone" of his retirement, where he continues to serve us as an alter Christus.

Mandatory celibacy, as Byrne has experienced it, "subjects the individual to a form of institutional control that it nearly total." Although Andrew Greeley, featured in the same issue ("A Priest Forever?"), might demur, Byrne correctly maintains that such control "has left our church reeling." No one said it better that Byrne himself, two years ago in America: "Our beloved church seems to be self-destructing."

E. LEO McMANNUS

Venice, Fla.

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