Catholics and America: A Question of Loyalty

A question that most had thought long answered has returned to stir and prick the conscience of faithful Catholics in America: How loyal to America should they be? This question has been renewed primarily because of contemporary controversies over marriage and religious freedom, and a palpable sense that when the Democratic Party again wields unified federal power it will harass and go after Catholic institutions should they fail to bow to the latest iterations of sexual liberation and identity politics. These political battles have sparked a number of recent essays and books from post-liberal Catholic thinkers who say that America's origins are rooted in the worst aspects of liberal modernity: secularism, individualism, materialism, and relativism. America's undoing is largely inevitable, they argue, owing to the philosophic, anthropological, and political errors that have shaped it, and what we are presently witnessing is the beginning of this fated end. Justice Anthony Kennedy's string of judicial opinions that highlighted a self-defining liberty rooted in emancipated human will serves as a revealing coda to an American constitutionalism breathing its most pure expression.