Real Catholic Political Analysis

As a palate cleanser for Liz Scalia's rather unanchored piece mentioned by Kathleen, I invite you to read George Weigel's recent discussion of real serious abuses in American Catholicism being promulgated by the liberal Catholic dissenters. Excerpt from his conclusion:

This new form of Catholicism Lite, a not-so-phantom hash of ideas that poses real problems for the integrity of the Church and its evangelical mission, breathes deeply of two winds that have long blown through American Christianity: the ancient Pelagian wind, with its emphasis on the righteousness of our works and how they will win our salvation; and the Congregationalist wind, with its deep suspicion that Catholic authority is incompatible with American democracy. As for the older Americanist controversy, I think the classic historiographers of U.S. Catholicism were largely right: The "Americanism" of which Leo XIII warned in Testem Benevolentiae was far more a phantom concocted by fevered, ancien-régime European minds than a heresy that threatened Catholic faith in the United States. But the problems that Leo flagged are very much with us over a century later. They are at the root of the internal Catholic culture war that has intensified as religious freedom has come under concerted assault, and as the new Americanists, who form a coherent party in a way that Isaac Hecker and his friends never did, have either denied that assault -- or abetted it.

If Catholics can't recognize and identify the political ideology from which 99.9% of the disobedience and dissent from the Magisterium is coming, then they are engaging in large-scale moral equivalency and willful denial. But they will see it as freedom from the shackles of lock-step conformity and the chains of ideological purity to continue confusing the beam and the mote.