That’s the question being asked by author, convert and FOB — Friend of the Bench — David Gibson in the Washington Post:

All you need to know to diagnose the state of the Catholic Church in America today is that Pope Benedict XVI — who has a knack for ticking off Muslims and Jews — spent the past week wandering the Middle East, yet Catholics here barely noticed. They were too busy fighting over Barack Obama’s appearance as commencement speaker at Notre Dame or arguing about the fate of a popular Miami priest known as “Father Oprah,” who was caught on camera sharing a seaside embrace with his girlfriend.

Is this what Catholicism in America has come to? Bickering about whether Notre Dame is really Catholic, or whether a priest can make out on the beach with his gal pal? Well, yes. And that should come as no surprise.

Since the emergence of Catholicism in the 19th century as a counterweight to the United States’s reigning Protestant culture, American Catholics have struggled to balance their desire to assimilate into society with the fear of losing their faith in the nation’s melting pot. These new controversies show that, in the Catholic saga, assimilation is winning.

That is because American Catholics — and there are upwards of 65 million of us — are going their own way on many matters of faith and especially on issues ranging from priestly celibacy to political candidates, and there seems to be little the bishops can do about it. If there is a true swing vote in the U.S. electorate today, it is the Catholic bloc. This disturbs conservative members of the faith, the self-styled “orthodox” who often dismiss such fickle folks as “cafeteria Catholics.” In the vacuum left by the disappearing Catholic subculture, conservatives have made politics the eighth sacrament, with one’s position on abortion and gay marriage becoming the litmus test of whether one is a “good Catholic,” or a Catholic at all.

This civil war, as the Catholic writer Peter Steinfels recently called it, between hard-liners and those seeking greater engagement, is one the church cannot win. A recent Pew survey showed that despite a generally greater “brand loyalty” than most faiths, Catholicism in America is bleeding out, to the point that nearly one in 10 Americans identifies as a former Catholic. For every one convert, four Catholics are leaving the church — half of them to traditions like evangelicalism that they find more spiritually fulfilling. Without the inflow of millions of Latino immigrants in recent decades, American Catholicism would be in decline, and even still the church is shrinking in many areas.

The conflicting identities of American Catholics have deep roots. Beginning in the 1800s, American Catholics insulated themselves by building an alternate universe of schools to educate their children, hospitals to care for their sick, and cemeteries to bury their dead. They were forbidden to marry outside the fold, and stepping inside a Protestant church was considered hazardous to the soul’s health. On the other hand, just as Catholics wanted to show Rome they could be every bit as Catholic as the pope, they also wanted to prove to their fellow citizens that they could be as red, white, and blue as any Connecticut Yankee. They fought in the nation’s wars, labored in the country’s factories, and turned out generations of college graduates who took their place among America’s elite. And after the presidential candidacy of Al Smith was thwarted in 1928 thanks in part to anti-Catholic canards, the faithful helped power John F. Kennedy to the White House in 1960.

Of course, just as Catholics finally arrived, they almost immediately set to fighting among themselves with a bitterness that would make even the most fractious Baptists blush. The Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s brought contested reforms that coincided with the social upheavals of that decade, and in 1968, as women were rejoicing in the liberation of The Pill, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirming the ban on artificial contraception. Some Catholics stormed off but others simply defected in place, feeling free to stay and disregard papal teaching. Then came Roe v. Wade, drawing Catholicism into the culture wars with a fury that seemed to peak during the 2008 election.

But it didn’t end on November 4. In March, when the University of Notre Dame invited President Obama to deliver its commencement address — as it has done for presidents going back to Eisenhower — conservative Catholics and a growing number of bishops (about 60 at last count, though still a minority of the nearly 290 active bishops in the United States) denounced the school and its president, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, in the harshest terms. Bishop Thomas G. Doran of Rockford, Ill., had perhaps the sharpest (and most insider) of jabs, calling Jenkins’s invitation “truly obscene” and suggesting that he rename the school “Northwestern Indiana Humanist University.”

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