So why did the Catholic radicals fail so signally? Partly because of the aftermath of Vatican II and the loss of Catholic identity. But that loss itself was indicative of a deeper problem. As with the pre-World War II Catholic activists, they had no real following with either the majority of lay Catholics or the hierarchy. Mostly converts or only-partly assimilated ethnics, they made the same mistake Paul Blanshard had made. They thought that, as a whole, Catholic Americans took their faith seriously. Our history since then shows that, as a whole, we did not. We are paying the price for that lack of zeal today.
I'm not going to address the claim that Catholic Americans generally did not take their faith seriously, which is rather difficult to prove. (An opinion that they accepted the priorities of the dominant urban mass culture, while difficult to prove stricly, would be more probable, at least, as they followed the same patterns of behavior.)
iirc, Coulombe is both a Latin traditionalist and a Latin integralist. So in his alternate history, how would have Roman Catholics successfully converted their Protestant neighbors? Assuming that the average Catholic was intellectually prepared to do so by the standards of his time (which would not include a strong familiarity with sacred scripture or knowledge of Greek), how would he have converted the average Protestant?
1. Using neoscholastic apologetics?
2. A Latin triumphalist view of the previous 450 years or so of the history of the West? (Especially one that traced the genealogy of everything that was wrong in the West to the Protestant Reformation.)
3. Appealing to the importance of a form of worship in a language unintelligible to most Protestants?
I really doubt that most Protestants would find these appeals convincing.
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