The recent column on men who use pipes has raised some smoke. I was sent a clipping about the German Protestant theologian, Kark Barth. Dr. Barth, offering a correspondent a cigar, observing that one could discern a theologian’s point of view by what he smokes: liberals, cigarettes; conservatives, pipes; barthians, cigars. This should calm the nerves of those who occasionally write me as a “so-called liberal” (An interesting question: Why are liberals always “so-called?”)

Another letter is so full of good things that I offer it to you entirely. The writer’s name is omitted lest the crack about Stalin get him in trouble with the Un-American Committee.

Dear Archbishop Hallinan,

I would like to add an Amen to your column on pipe smokers.

Of course, we do it just because we like it. There’s no such thing as a tweedy-weedy set, calm and unhurried, defusing bombs as a hobby:

You need not ask him, “Where’s the fire?” When it’s always

In

His

Briar.

I don’t know where this idea came up that we’re all a bunch of turret-faced Buddhas without jitters. No sturm and drang -- only stem and drag.

All burley and no hurley? Nonsense.

Decisions come easier over a pipe? Hardly. Stoking up the old chimney can be the best way to put one off. I know. The Edgeworth folks ought to be shot in the morning for that canard. In fact, one of their reputed customers could have done the shooting like an old pro. Know who he was, supposedly? Stalin. That’s according to John Gunther’s Inside Europe, the 1940 “War Edition,” page 532. (Irritate a pipe-smoking history major and you may get somebody pretty mean.) Gunther says Stalin imported his Edgeworth special. No common, odiferous Opium of the People for him.

I must confess I do have a pipe dream about this business. I would like to do something the joys of which send me into poesy again: Traveling the smoke

From here to Paducah,

I gladly unwind

And puff at my hookah.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta