The editorial, "Flaunting Authority," raised alarm signals, because so many otherwise educated people do not seem to know the difference between flaunt and flout. (Among them is one of your correspondents, whose letter is printed on the very same page.)

However, a close reading of the editorial suggests that you were employing flaunt in its true meaning. Bishop Bartlett, in ordaining contrary to the agreement of the House of Bishops, flaunted his own authority as a diocesan. He flaunted the koinonia of the bishops in the sense that he treated it as a collective reality inhering fully in each bishop severally; he subsumed the koinonia as personal to himself and flaunted it - "Every bishop is all the bishops, and I am a bishop. I can do pretty much as I like, and who is to stop me?" That, as you strongly show, was the import of his action. He was behaving in the spirit of that saying of not long ago, "If you've got it, flaunt it!" He quite correctly pointed out that he had the authority, and he flaunted it.

At the same that he flaunted his own authority, of course, he flouted the authority of the House of Bishops.

Phyllis Dean Spring Grove, Va.