He offers a critique at the end of the piece, but he ends it on more of a "traditionalist" note than not:
Any honest look at American history will show that negative liberty, “freedom from,” has consistently triumphed in its battle against positive conceptions of human flourishing and the common good. It will also show that there is nothing in our quasi-Masonic public religion, from Washington and Lincoln to Ronald Reagan, which could have prevented this development. Catholics can work with the American system, but they first must realize what it is. When the Church converted the Roman Empire, it knew that it was dealing with a pagan institution. American Catholics since John Courtney Murray have approached the U.S. Constitution, and the American ideal of liberty, as somehow crypto-Catholic and in need only of our full-throated assent. If Catholics are to be truly Catholic in America, and not just a branch office of the Church of Liberty, we need to first stand apart from a political tradition born in a revolt against the Catholic Church."Traditionalist" may be too narrow a term, in this case. Maybe there are some Catholic intellectuals on the "left" who would agree with Dr. Shannon, rejecting liberalism in favor of their own version of "Catholic" statism. (But Dr. Shannon himself is not a man of the left, as far as I know.)
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