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be characterized as one in which man has become more conscious of his dignity than ever before. It is also the age in which man is, in the face of very great odds, trying to exercise his human freedom more intelligently than ever before in history. So it is with the American priest. While he may be described as struggling and in. conflict the American priest is actually demonstrating profound human aspirations for a fullness of life and a richer responsibility for himself. These are basic Christian attitudes that can hardly be put aside. It is unfortunate that at times the aspirations of priests for a fuller kind of life are caricatured as the wailings of spoiled children. American priests are sensitive men who realize that their growth is not finished and who want to be busy about completing it. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, recently wrote "how easier to self-sacrifice than self-realization." Many American priests, in their patient-efforts to deal with the problems of their own growth, have discovered the profundity of this phrase in recent years. They have learned that positive growth is a far greater challenge than the kind of short circuiting of the personality that is involved in massive self-denial. A new consciousness of this has come to great numbers of American priests who have re-examined themselves and their motivations in the light of new developmental insights into themselves. This is not to say that every priest is energetically trying to develop himself to his full potential. Some priests, like some men around them, simply sell out, withdrawing into personalities where hardened and defensive walls have kept them safe from real contact with life for many years. Others do not even suspect that they have growth problems. They, again like many men in the American population, live a dangerously superficial life, moving only in the shallows of human existence, protected against the ravages of ordinary experience by the sociological dimensions of the clerical state itself. The vital edge of the Amel"ican priesthood, however, has come to sense anew the personalistic glory of Christianity and to apply it, even unsuredly and in small doses, to their own life experience. Many of them have not progressed beyond the realization that they have missed a good deal of life because they have allowed their psychological growth to fall behind their chronological