"LIII Libras"

To drum up business for its London-Rome route, British European Airways sent a letter to 7,200 Roman. Catholic clergymen in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was no ordinary promotion letter; it was in Latin and it urged the priests to visit Rome during the Holy Year of 1950.

Said the letter: "The fact that the Venerable Bede was able to travel to Rome nine times during his life* demonstrates clearly the miserable condition of our time, in which one moves about Europe with the utmost difficulty . . . But . . . B.E.A. truthfully promises to deliver your person at Rome in a mere seven hours . . . and all for the price of LIII libras [-L-53]."

By this week, B.E.A.'s replies were rolling in, half of them in Latin. Said one, freely translated: "Most learned manager of sales: Nothing would be more welcome to me than to ... travel to Rome . . . But the LIII libras are lacking unto me. Farewell." Total response to date: VL.

* Modern church scholars now question whether the Venerable Bede, an 8th Century Benedictine monk of St. Paul's monastery at Jarrow, England, ever made any such trips. Wrote Bede: "I have spent the whole of my life within that monastery."

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