Vooglaid is right: we do need militancy, but rightly targeted. Francoist Spain was thoroughly, formally Catholic. And when Franco died, so did a large part of the Church there. Similarly with Ireland, where the Catholic Church was formally dominant, but which had ceased to be able to convey its ideals to its people in ways that were inwardly compelling. This is why Irish Catholicism collapsed so quickly.
The institutional Church had its problems -- possibly because it was an "institution" rather than striving to be the Body of Christ.
AmConMag: Choose Your Enemies Wisely By ROD DREHER
What I’m hearing from my traditional Christian contacts around the country is frustration over the unwillingness of people who think of themselves as religious conservatives to do the hard work of building and sustaining a real resistance. One man told me not long ago that he and his wife took their kids out of their local Catholic school and put them into a classical Christian school because their kids weren’t learning anything at the Catholic school. He said that he and his wife finally concluded that most parents didn’t want the Catholic school to be challenging, not on faith matters or anything else.
I heard the same thing last year from a Catholic educator who told me that the Catholic school bureaucracy in his city was mediocre and fiercely devoted to protecting that mediocrity. And most parents, in his view, were happy with that, because they were only really interested in alleviating their anxiety over their children’s education. That is, they wanted to be able to tell themselves that their children were getting a “Catholic education,” whatever that turned out to be. This, in a deep Red State diocese.
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