It’s something I do whenever I go to church, part of the ritual before the ritual, the liturgical pregame. I claim my six feet of pew, shuck my coat, check my watch, and make a nodding attempt to woo solemnity. Then I size up the crowd. Anybody else young here. There's a couple whose matching madras shorts declare them JUST MARRIED. A girl wearing a Cardinal Hayes sweatshirt twists a finger through her brilliant red hair. A Columbia University student, Opus Dei division, is bent over in the stylized prostration of a fresco saint. I take an interior leap, joining them in that most inclusive of groups, the generation. Our generation. What brings us together? What do we share? How do we believe? What are we doing here, today? 

These are questions that many people have been asking, in voices edged with parental concern. A year ago, you'll remember, Commonweal published "Re-Generating Catholicism" (September 14, 1990), a hefty special issue in which fifteen Catholic leaders addressed the challenges the church faces in ministering to Catholics raised since Vatican II. In the New York Times last spring (May 1,1991), Peter Steinfels reported on the changing religious aspects of Catholic higher education, leading off with Avery Dulles's claim that a drift toward "total secularization" is seen as "by now inevitable in practically all Catholic universities." Soon afterward Raymond Schroth reflected further on the subject in these pages (June 1, 1991). And somber essays about "How We Can Preserve the Presence of Our Beloved Namesake Saint" are staple fare in Catholic-school alumni magazines, as inevitable as the class notes and the fundraising campaigns. 

These discussions have focused on the dichotomy between the large numbers of young Catholics and the vagueness of our religious identity. If you cast the net wide, as Commonweal's special issue did, and claim as "young Catholics" all of the people between the ages of twenty and thirty-five who at least "retain residual loyalties [to] and identification" with the church, we are a crowd (40 percent of adult Catholics are younger than thirty-five, according to one study). Having grown up in the shadow of Vatican II, during a period of phenomenal social change, we share a compelling experience. Yet our religious character is felt to be limp and shallowly rooted; perhaps we aren't authentically Catholic. Older Catholics have found it hard to get a handle on us--a problem compounded by our lack of a collective identity, and by our seeming reluctance, or inability, to articulate our religious beliefs and act on them. 

Of course, concerns about passing on the faith are endemic to Catholicism, and to religion in general. In this country the alarm seems to sound every other papacy or so, as the church feels The World aggressively courting the faithful's hearts and minds and attention spans. Responses to the alarm have been various. After the Third Plenary Council a century ago, the parochial school system tried walling the world out in order to nurture God's children within; a generation ago the church as a whole took the opposite tack, practically redefining itself as God's people in order to go out into the world along with those children.

Like those efforts, the present discussions about young Catholics have the split personality of a saving act, with everyday pessimism undergirded by the hopefulness of a redeemed people. There are important differences this time around, however. Most striking, to me, is the extent to which these discussions about young Catholics are grounded in Vatican II's understanding of the church as the people of God. If what I've gleaned from paperback religious history is sound, previous reclamation efforts focused on saving souls, with the church's continued eminence taken for granted. In contrast, the present discussions about young Catholics suggest that Catholic leaders are less concerned with our welfare than with the well-being of the church generally. This is a natural consequence of the council's revised understanding of the church, and its corresponding revision of the nature of salvation. If you see the church chiefly as the body of its people, and not chiefly as, say, a divine agency appointed by God to do his saving work on earth, your in-house evangelizing efforts will be less menacing but also somewhat less compelling. Since you see young Catholics as responsible adults and not as God's children in need of divine protection, at most you can strongly encourage them to be open to the life of faith. Your sense that Catholicism isn't taking hold on the younger end leads you to think not of souls lost for eternity, but of the church losing its vigor in the here and now. Because you can't get all that worked up about young people going to hell, you mostly worry that if you fail to sponsor a Catholic identity in them, the religion you've known will go out of this corner of the world, and the kids will have missed out on something grand. 

Protest though you may, if you are an American church leader today, deep down you see Catholicism as necessary in our culture but optional for this or that person. This is realistic, right-thinking, open-minded, a balm for the soul in tough times-but it lowers the stakes of your enterprise, and ushers in a spirit of contradiction and self-doubt right from the start. 

The recent discussions about young Catholics are prime examples of this spirit of contemporary Catholicism, in which the deposit of faith can be obscured by the concerns about how to pass it on. As such they suffer just the ailments—generation gaps, failures of communication, religious practice distinct from religious content—for which they sought to prescribe remedies. Consider last September's "Re-Generating Catholicism." Here were thirty-two pages of essays, roundtable discussions, statistical breakdowns and the like, in which Catholic leaders asked themselves and each other: How or why should young adults continue as bearers of the Catholic tradition? Earnestly, with loving care and strains of optimism now and then, they tried to understand our relationships with the church—our tendency to pick and choose from church teachings, our relative ignorance of Christian history and doctrine, our way of measuring the church by our own experience, our willingness to keep religion at the margins of our lives, and our basically good intentions despite it all. Robert Egan summed up their concerns in his afterword: "How do we hand on anything we love or care about? How do we hand on the inspirations for our committed service and the causes of our joy? How do we hand on an intellectual tradition, a symbolic and sacramental tradition, a prophetic and politically engaged tradition, a tradition of valuing community, in a culture like our own?" 

Only a stone-hearted young Catholic could have been left unmoved by such concern. Even so, few of us could have failed to notice that in this groupthink about young Catholics, "young Catholics" remained a stretchy, all-purpose abstraction. As far as I could tell, only two real live young Catholics contributed to the special issue. The leaders addressed their readers as "we" and young Catholics as "they," to wit: "When we talk about young adult Catholics, we are usually talking about a crisis .... Maybe our young are leaving the church because they are selfish and callow .... Or perhaps, in some way, we ourselves are to blame." For the most part they discussed "young Catholics" in vague collective terms; only rarely did a sense that we are singular people emerge. 

Granted, recognizable trends prompted the abstract us-andthem approach. The clergy, lay leadership, and Commonweal's audience are graying; young Catholics don't seem all that eager to describe our spiritual lives to others; and even if we were, we might not be able to do so with the sophistication they would like from us. These trends, of course, are the substance of the challenge that "Re-Generating Catholicism" set out to engage.

The issue's contributors, splendidly contradictory on most points, shared a key assumption about the nature of this challenge. The problem, they seemed to say, is that young Catholics are in the church but not of it. We belong to parishes, attend services, marry other Catholics, and hope to raise our children Catholic, whatever that might mean. We keep abreast of the most visible church activities and controversies, let our thoughts tend Christward when time permits, have vague spiritual experiences and ethical criteria, mean well. Okay, they allowed, we are Catholics--and yet (they went on) we lack a moral and religious vocabulary, an informed awareness of tradition, an acceptance of duty, an understanding of obedience, a respect for a hierarchy of values, a sense of the church's absoluteness. In short, they said, we lack the essential traits of Catholicism as it has been passed down from age to age. 

Such a view enables church leaders to identify much that is true about young Catholics today, as well as to address absences or failures of the spirit that they feel in the church themselves. Yet in the end the in-the-church-but-not-of-it interpretation obscures as much as it clarifies. Why? It puts the emphasis in the wrong place, presents the paradox upside down. More than we are in the church but not of it, my experience suggests, young Catholics today are of the church but not in it: Though we will describe ourselves as Catholic, we balk at calling ourselves Catholics, wary of the belonging the stronger noun form connotes. The differences are subtle, but crucial. I think the church's recognition of this might encourage young Catholics to stop sliding down the slippery slope and get on with our ascent. 

How are young Catholics "of the church"? First of all—as the experts' statistics make clear—we consider ourselves Catholic. We share the "Catholic sensibility" and "sacramental imagination" identified by Eugene Kennedy and David Tracy. We measure our lives, and the church's, by Christ's teachings in the Gospels. We feel the influence of this or that priest, nun, or lay person (often a parent). We take a familial, proprietary interest in the doings of Governor Mario Cuomo or Father Bruce Ritter or the "20120" exorcist. Even if we don't know our way around the Summa or read the encyclicals the day they come out, we seek wholeness, harmony, and radiance, a sense of order and a rule of life, a body of values and images that will locate transcendence in the day to day. We have misgivings as we strive for "worldly" success, and feel uneasy as we attain it. Pursuing our own ends, we try to be unselfish and attentive to other people's needs and suffering. We want to live Christian lives and then go to heaven—and yet we are (most of us, most of the time) wary of full-blown belonging, the sort of commitment that, Catholic leaders contend, would regenerate Catholicism and American culture as well. 

In what ways are we not quite "in the church"? The most talked-about indicator, of course, is that few of us consider ourselves called to serve the church as priests or religious. As much as this has to do with the demands of professed religious vocations (celibacy, tests of orthodoxy, long hours, low pay), it has more to do with a deeper impulse: namely, that so many of us are willing to let our Catholicism rest at the level of "residual loyalties and affiliation." This impulse shakes out for us in all sorts of ways. We might check "Catholic" on a census form or Lilly questionnaire, but we often check our Catholicism at the door of the top-flight graduate school or big corporation; conversely, we too often leave our skills as thinkers or workers at home when we go to church, consigning the dirty work to the priests and veterans and fanatics. Rather than seriously challenging church positions to which we might object—sexuality, the role of women, capitalism, war—we disregard them, or else confine our dissent to our kitchens and bedrooms. We partake of the sacraments as if they're performed for us as a public service, without feeling compelled to serve in our own ways. Though we feel misgivings about success, we stay on the ladder; though we want to be unselfish, we don't go out of our way to be. While the surveys count us as "young Catholics," for us church membership is usually a secondary affiliation—mainly we're bankers or teachers or students or feminists or Deadheads or New Yorkers or Giants fans. The church has always been there for us, and so, we assume, it always will be, regardless of whether we play active roles in it. After all, it's not our church; sure, we belong to it—but not really. Someone else will assume the day-to-day responsibility, somebody else will take charge. 

Most of these traits were noted by the contributors to "ReGenerating Catholicism." But interpreting them as signs that we are Catholic more than we are Catholics, and not the other way round, might yield the solutions about how to revive us and the church. It might explain a number of phenomena: Why the polls say the churches are full of young people, while the priests' eyes say the young laborers are few—being "of the church" always and everywhere, we don't need to confirm it by being in the church on any particular day. Why young Catholics, so stealthy and somnolent when we are in church, are so animated by the God-talk in Woody Allen's films or Bill Moyers's PBS chats with Joseph Campbell: glib and elliptical as they are, those people discuss life and death, history and eternity, in the sort of frank, learned language that rarely issues from the pulpits of suburbia. Why our collective identity is so slippery and vague: without the shared liturgy and community that come with being in the church, our of-the-churchness makes itself felt in more varied and ambiguous ways. Why there is a definite "twice-born" sensibility among those young Catholics, especially the better-educated ones, who are learned in and committed to a life of faith: since so little is expected of us by now beyond residual loyalties and affiliation, real religious experience comes upon us like the hand of God. Why attendance at campus chapels, as Michael Hunt noted in the special issue, usually tops that in the average parish: there, far more than elsewhere, young Catholics are encouraged to believe that this is our church, that we are not junior members or summer associates or novices in formation but the thing itself—Catholics, worshiping our God, taking part in the rites of our religion, practicing our faith. 

Perhaps most important, seeing young Catholics as of the church more than in it might explain why people thirty-five years old, fully adult by any other standard, can still be considered "young Catholics." If solid, informed, public commitment is Catholic leaders' measure of religious maturity, it follows that so many of us, uncommitted less because of age than because of disposition, nonetheless seem so young to them, so reluctant to come into our inheritance, with all its demands and rewards. Such a measure of religious maturity is a fundamental reason why so many of us will never get there. For the of-the-church outlook I've described is a religion of sensibility; and sensibility, as the New Republic's Andrew Sullivan has noted, "is a paltry substitute for revealed truth," a shadow of the spiritual promise that Jesus announced and urged us toward. Sensibility is not the stuff of commitment. It alone cannot regenerate any church or transform any culture, and a generation of Catholics who consider themselves merely "of the church" won't invigorate their religion, much less usher in any kingdom of God. 

How might young Catholics' religion of sensibility be fleshed out and made whole? Clearly our acceptance or rejection of this religion is ultimately our own responsibility. But older Catholics clearly have much to offer us as we come to terms with Christ and the church—if they are willing. Ironically, many such leaders, having done everything in their power to bring us up in the church, now would keep us out of it because we aren't Catholic enough, with their sense of our difference from them undermining their efforts to share a faith with us. Not only is this sense of our difference a self-fulfilling prophecy; it also obscures what we all share—our Americanness, for example, and our place on this side of Vatican II. Today's older American Catholics are the first to have lived in rapprochement with the modern world, bodying forth the outward-looking church the council called for in a setting where modernity is particularly aggressive and enchanting. As such they have a great deal in common with young Catholics, whether they think so or not. 

As far as church leaders' responsibilities go, then, the first step toward young Catholics' fleshy wholeness is fairly simple. Passive and uninformed as our faith may seem to be, older Catholics should regard it as continuous with their own faith and the one handed down by the Apostles, hoping that keener faith will follow. Is this a deal with the devil? Arguably. Will it "work"? Maybe. But if you don't consider us people who are of the church, we'll probably never come all the way into it.

But how? How might sensibility be developed, prompting the church's younger members to come more fully into the fold? The editors of "Re-Generating Catholicism" suggested that most observers "too readily credit the council for a generation gap and overlook the powerful pull of American culture in absorbing young Catholics into the mainstream." Powerful as the influence of American culture upon young Catholics is, in my view the influence of Vatican II upon us cannot be stressed enough. And in the analyses of the council's effects, the key one is often underplayed. This is our sense that there are two churches the church as it is now and the church as it was before Vatican II. From what I've seen, young people striving for a mature understanding of Catholic faith feel that we must come to terms not only with the present church, but with another, older one. Largely through legend and anecdote and outdated depictions in the media and the arts, that church lingers just over the horizon as the church we never knew—an evil empire, a land of milk and honey, the repressive regime, the real thing, a straw man, the Body of Christ, the source of life or of our parents' compulsions and our neuroses. Young Catholics may act as if we're unaware of, or uninterested in, Catholic tradition—but we're grappling with that old church, its Latin Masses and catechisms and Friday fasts and seeming certitudes and its way of affecting those who did know it. Making our peace with that church is often a necessary step toward making our peace with the present one. Failing to do so, we feel that our faith lacks authenticity, that we don't, can't, quite belong—not to the churches of our parents, the ones in our neighborhoods, or the one founded in Jerusalem. 

Here a snapshot of my own spiritual gropings might help to illustrate the point. The outlines of it are the kind that Catholic leaders have held up as ideals. A Catholic upbringing that imparted a sense of God's presence and the church's importance, in a family that offered the constancies of faith, hope, and love. After public high school, a Jesuit university education, which provided all the elements of "Catholic identity": the instruments for navigating in the Christian heritage, a number of exemplary teachers and priests, a sense of the church's intellectual resources past and present, and a life among Catholic believers of all sorts, in a setting where religion was actively practiced and intelligently discussed—a school of, with, and for faith, to put it simply. Later, graduate work at a university on the frontiers of multiculturalism, which prompted me to explore and assert my own cultural heritage, if only to set myself apart the way everybody else was doing. 

With all due gratitude to everyone, however, I must say that in understanding Catholicism I came to feel that I was on my own. Regardless of whether this was true, it was made so by my sense that it was, and enforced by the fact that my religious flare-ups came during the summers, when I was out of school and pretty much alone. As an aspiring writer, I naturally looked to books; as a typically literal-minded young person, I longed for a synthesis that would interpret Catholicism for me and answer all the big questions: What brings us together? What do we share? How do we believe? What are we doing here, today? In my pursuit of synthetic truth, I ran smack up against Vatican II. The old medieval and Tridentine syntheses seemed tainted, since I assumed that their essentials had been revised or reversed by the council. Though the broadest of the newer books (such as Rahner's and Küng's) seemed shorn of Catholic language and history, they presupposed the very knowledge of Catholic tradition that I sought from them. Sure, these were shallow impressions—but thus deterred, I never read any of those books through.

Instead, while I waited to discover the big book that would make sense of it all, I read little ones of all sorts—old and new, Orbis and Ignatius, Penguin and Paulist, skeptical and devotional, from Augustine to Chesterton to Copleston to Berrigan to Pelikan to all sorts of "Catholic" fiction—Waugh’s, Endo's, David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? And then, of course, there were the Gospels and Epistles, bound pocket-size or in massive study versions with their involuted commentaries and tiny notes. Of all these books, the ones I found most congenial and moving were those by Newman, Merton, and Flannery O'Connor—the greatest hits of the preconciliar era, I know now. Each of these writers became my companion in faith for a while, as I tried to fully enter into his or her outlook. But my efforts were thwarted, again, by Vatican II. Reading these writers required an ongoing act of translation, as I compared the church they described with the one I encountered, which seemed to give the lie to so much of what they set forth—whether Newman's idea of the church as "a supereminent prodigious power sent upon earth to encounter and master a giant evil," or O'Connor's praise of its "absolute values," or Merton's evocation of a Sunday when the priests were young and the church was full and the sermon was "clear and solid," carrying "the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition." What did that church have in common with the shifty and self-doubting church I knew—its values uncertain, its everyday tradition going back to 1955 or so, its sermons inspired by M. Scott Peck and Phil Donahue? And which church was the one, holy, catholic, apostolic one? As a young Catholic, had I been disinherited by the council, or given the keys to the kingdom?

Of course, the two churches had much in common-namely, God and Christ and the workings of the Spirit in a fallen world. And what Merton and Newman and O'Connor conveyed, as no synthesis could have, was the urgency and necessity with which the church can represent those workings to the individual soul. Even as they gave me a sense of Catholicism's essentials, those writers made clear that this is a "multiform Communion" (Newman), with the believer apprehending shared truths through his or her own disposition and obsessions. Even as they conveyed the tenor of an earlier era's Catholicism, they exploded my view, a common one among young Catholics, that a monolithic and changeless church preceded Vatican II. Most important, my ongoing "translation" of those writers compelled me to actively engage this religion, past and present, and as a result to see ways in which the old church and the new church are one church after all—Newman's principle of doctrinal development laying the groundwork for the council, or Merton's life joining monastic contemplation to contemporary social justice efforts, or O'Connor's Catholic vision focusing on characters who are practically unchurched, and so must grapple toward God through a terrible aloneness. 

Is my experience unique? Perhaps, and yet I think that it is representative. For example, most young Catholics are painfully aware of the distance between the church here and the church in Europe, historically and currently. The distance between St. Peter's Basilica and the poured-concrete structure down the road; between the soaring, abstruse language of the Confessions and the easy slang of Catholic self-help books; between the pope's absolute statements on his world tours and Father So-and-So's utter uncertainty about whether to give today's homily with or without a microphone—for us these are constant and bewildering. While older Catholics, recalling the preconciliar church and what it taught them, seem able to make their own judgments and adjustments, many young Catholics simply find the distances absurd, and leave it at that. 

Partly as a result, among the church's younger members Catholic guilt has been supplanted by Catholic shame—a deep embarrassment about our church and its presence in the culture. In part we are ashamed for the reasons that Christians have always felt ashamed: we associate faith with childhood and are eager to throw off childish ways; we disapprove of the church's doings; we appraise the church by its own standards and it doesn't measure up; or we appraise ourselves and realize that we don't live up to what Christ and the church demand of us. 

Mostly, though, we are ashamed because we lack the resources of Catholic tradition that might enable us to reconcile seeming opposites and make sense of the absurdity we confront. Tradition can tell us that poured concrete reflects postwar America just as gilt and statuary did Baroque-era Rome; that Augustine's intimate first-person address to God was pretty slangy for its time; and that the pope's triumphal junkets and So-and-So's mike-anxiety both reflect the contemporary priest's dilemma— whether he should speak as a leader over his people or just go out and try to be one of them. And tradition can remind us that the church is by its nature less than perfect, with doubt, dissent, and contradiction always as crucial to its project as the celebrated virtues of certainty and authority. 

Absurd-seeming, shame-inducing—often the Catholic church in America doesn't seem like the way to God. Catholics young and old sense this, so there are diminished expectations on both ends, grounded in a fear that this religion can't be efficacious, much less necessary. And in day-to-day Catholic life there is far too little that suggests otherwise. For older Catholics, in their embrace of Vatican II, have in many cases forfeited the resources of the larger tradition, and as a result often seem to be making things up as they go along. In reversing this trend, a reacquaintance with the Catholic tradition seems especially promising. For all of its anachronisms and complications, our heritage is a treasure house of the kingdom of necessity—full of riches, from the patristic writings to the purposeful wanderings of a David Toolan, that testify to the urgency and fruitfulness of an encounter with the God who came to earth.

Of course, calling for a reacquaintance with the Catholic tradition is neither a modest proposal nor a novel one. No doubt many Catholic leaders have been trying to bring such a reacquaintance about, with disappointing results. How might such efforts be made more compelling? Perhaps we all could learn from the liberation movements to which the church often seems outwardly opposed. Lacking authorized, institutionalized examples of their own heritage, women, blacks, and homosexuals for example are reconsidering history with a fervor that can seem alarming. What alarms, perhaps, is that in doing so they have not set aside their contemporary urgency; rather, they have unabashedly brought it to their appraisal of history, so that they might bring the past to bear on their current concerns, which, however forward-looking, need a longer perspective to inform, guide, and inspire. 

For the church, too, a reacquaintance with the past is necessary, not optional. Because Catholicism has a long and continuous tradition, we must encounter it, whether we wish to or not. It isn't going to go away—but if we don't frankly engage it, it will just make itself felt in less compelling ways, as nostalgia or parody or an antique or a skeleton in the closet. 

And the church, too, has got to bring to the past an urgent sense of the present, starting with the hump on the land that is the Second Vatican Council—a grassy knoll, but one that can be hard to see over. Too often Catholics try to pass on tradition untranslated, handing off The Long Loneliness or The Everlasting Man as if its ability to speak without commentary is a mark of its timelessness. Or we look to the unifying forces of sociology or core curricula, supposing that once the general outlines are in place we can set about passing the tradition on. In doing so, we invoke the one element of Catholic tradition that is unlikely to return any time soon, or to be of much use to us: the sense that the church's chief note is its internal coherence, which will answer all questions and dispel all doubts. 

Our concerns about how the church should share the Catholic faith with its younger members are with us to stay, and they are necessarily many-sided and discursive. Recognizing this, we should resist simplifying them in order to make the going easier. Tradition alone cannot answer our questions for us; nor can modernity. We must consult Sts. Thomas and Teresa, along with the social sciences, look at The Idea of a University as well as the academic-freedom guidelines, drawing on each as we translate the other. There will be conflicts—but conflicts, as our tradition tells us, can be the grounds for faith as well as obstacles to it. Ask St. Paul. 

Those who could lead the way in this, of course, are older Catholics who are willing to engage younger Catholics and share what they have thought, felt, known, and believed. Just as believers like Newman, Merton, and O'Connor linked one era to another through their work, so might older Catholics continue to do so for the Catholics raised after Vatican II, spanning the pre- and postconciliar eras with the bridges that are their own lives. As they do this, they will have begun to pass Catholic identity on. The long-term value of getting reacquainted with tradition speaks for itself, through the babble of voices that somehow have been heard as one, harmonized by the grace that is their common source. In the short term, getting reacquainted with the Catholic tradition would enable us—all of us—to see the present concerns about "Catholic identity" against a transcendent background. History can remind us that the challenges of passing on faith are abiding ones, thus disallowing us the modem solipsism which exalts the present as a time unequaled in its despair and sense of loss; it can show us that the antipodes of content and practice, of believing and belonging, have characterized the church since its founding. Scripture can let us say, with the Psalmist, that to "dwell in the house of the Lord" is "to inquire in his temple," and, with Peter in council, that "we believe we are saved in the same way as they are: through the grace of the Lord Jesus." Doctrine can help us to understand today's dilemmas—the Fall testifying that the impulse to see the present as inferior to the past is at the core of our nature, or infant baptism showing that the church, confident of "growth in faith," has long been willing to regard the most nascent believer as Catholic, no doubt about it. And the act of passing on tradition, with the act of translation this requires, can spur us to try bridging all the familiar gaps—between younger Catholics and older ones, between the present and the past, between mortality and eternity, and so on. 

In saying this, I don't mean to underestimate the realness of generational differences or the sense among church leaders that what constitutes Catholicism for the church's younger members often barely resembles the faith they know. I don't mean to romanticize the Catholic past, just to say that it's back there, either to enrich us or to haunt us. And I don't mean to chastise the Catholic leaders whose intelligence and compassion have so animated their discussions of young Catholics and our religious identity. I mean only to suggest that the best way for older Catholics to minister to "young Catholics," and vice-versa, is for all of us to renounce such a distinction as limiting and divisive, choosing instead to emphasize what we share—our common faith and our long and complex tradition and our contemporary American situation and our bonds to one another.