President Obama’s morally confused paean to platitudes at Notre Dame University over the weekend has been cast as a story about abortion, about rifts in the Catholic Church, about the culture wars. Really, it’s about none of these. It’s about the dissolution of the Catholic Church in America, and the fear of Life that has gripped it in the process. Let me explain.

Ever and always part of the avant-garde, my family bought a 1986 GMC Suburban in 1991 just before we left God’s Country (Texas) and moved West to Arizona. My father boasted that we finally had a Catholic Cadillac of our own, which was probably a good idea, as cramming mother, father, two teenage boys and two pre-teen girls, luggage, pets, and fighting space into a 1984 Olds Delta 88 had become nearly impossible. During our first road trip in that gas-guzzling behemoth, I thought someone had dropped us into a luxury vehicle: No longer was I sandwiched between Mom and Dad up front (the eldest son must bear burdens for his siblings). No longer was leg room a pins-and-needles dream, brought on by insufficient oxygen, bad air conditioning, and circulation problems. My beloved pet blue gourami died on that trip – a victim of the Arizona evening heat with which I had no experience – but even so, my memories of that trip are relatively pleasant, and best summed up by a thought I had somewhere near El Paso: Thank God there are only six of us.

Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, a family of six was considered on the big side outside of the heavily Mormon area to which we eventually moved, so much so that the sobriquet for the Suburban we learned there – “BMW” or “Big Mormon Wagon” – seemed more apropos than “Catholic Cadillac.” Today, even among – indeed, especially among – Catholics, it would be considered huge.

The story of the post-Vatican II American Catholic Church has been told so many times that I won’t bore anyone with it here. I will, however, summarize: The Catholicism lived by American Catholics has ceased to be a celebration of the chaotic, explosive, messy fact of human life, ordered to worship and union with the Creator, and is instead an irritable reflex.

That story is told in thirty years of polls that would have shaken the Church a century ago – a third of Catholics are functionally Unitarians (by which I mean they believe in a single-Person God, not that they don’t believe in anything), 75% of American Catholics dissent from the Church’s teaching on birth control (down from 85% ten years ago!), a majority of young Catholics believe they do not need to attend weekly Mass in order to be good Catholics, and so on, in a depressing litany – and in the evidence before our very eyes. I attend a relatively conservative exurban parish, and because I have small children, with all the normalcy that implies, I’ve been to basically every weekend Mass on offer. Gone are the families of twelve and fourteen children of yesteryear, and rare are the families of six and eight children of four decades gone. The overwhelming picture is of couples in their late thirties and early forties with one, two, or three children, and rarely, a family in their late twenties or early thirties with more. Anyone who believes Latin American immigration will somehow act as a cure for this subtle embrace of the Culture of Death need only attend a Spanish Mass and count the number of families toting more than two children. If possible, it’s relatively depressing.

Therein lies the beginning of the story of How President Obama Went to Visit Notre Dame. We did not simply arrive, by some hidden transmutation, at a point where American Catholics favor abortion on demand (and embryonic stem cell research) at a higher rate than the population at large, and where the majority of the student body and faculty of what was, at one time, the premiere Catholic university in the country would loudly applaud a man who has spoken of good will in the abortion wars, and gone on to fight every single legal restriction on the slaughter of the most defenseless of us all. We arrived there through the cowardice of the bishops, through a hierarchy terrified of its laity and the changes in the laity, and through a laity that became mainline Protestants.

Any history of modern American Catholicism must begin with the suburbs. Ethnic Catholic factory workers and their children raced to the suburbs for more land, better schools (the dream of universal Catholic education was always a dream), less congestion, and, over time, white flight. It was the first, real break in the old, established parish system, wherein generations would go from Baptism to a funeral Mass in the same diocese, and usually the same parish. This had two direct effects: It upended the relationship between parish priests and bishops on the one hand, and the flock on the other; and severed the day-to-day traditions that were bound up with the practice of the Faith – everything from the mere act of walking to Mass to Knights of Columbus meetings to bingo at the parish hall – robbing Catholics of the muscle memory of a life that revolved around the parish.

As suburbanization got underway, the second seismic shock hit: the Second Vatican Council. More used as a symbol of unbridled liberation by the Left and Right (for different reasons) than properly understood, the Council was deadly to American Catholicism at that moment in time for a single, commendable reason: The Ecumenical Council felt it a good idea to remind the laity that the Church was not just the priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals, and Popes, but also the rest of the Pilgrim People of God. It was a wonderful idea, and a necessary corrective that sadly still hasn’t taken hold. The timing might have been a scad off.

The Second Vatican Council happened to take place during the cultural dissolution of the 1960s. Nuns and priests renounced their sacred vows, sometimes marrying each other (sometimes still in habits and collars while doing so), while the laity, ever more involved in the Mass due to the liturgical reforms of the Council, were being told that fewer and fewer functions of the Church actually required the outward symbols of the Church to which they had grown accustomed — everything from priests and nuns to churches shaped like crosses or a processional line. The Church’s broader teachings about the validity of other faiths and the importance of conscience in the wake of the Council only added flame to the fuel. Not coincidentally, Americans were discovering that they could control the messy, vibrant, painful, rewarding experience of life by limiting the number of times it came into the world.

The two forces combined at once to basically convince American Catholics that the entirety of their creedal profession was optional, and to frighten the hierarchy with declining religious orders and declining attendance in the pews. Unsurprisingly, the American Catholic Church is now locked in a vicious, slowly-devolving cycle in which prominent and everyday Catholics offer groundbreaking new insights into Catholic theology utterly at odds with, well, Catholic theology, to the silence of the religious too frightened to contradict them more than occasionally.

So it is that American Catholics can justifiably be confused as to the Church’s teachings. (No one actually expects them to read the Catechism, and certainly, few if any Confirmation classes require it.) Here, from following the news, is what the average American Catholic knows about his Church: That it opposes the War in Iraq; that the Pope opposes legalized abortion; that the Church opposes efforts to control illegal immigration; that the Church may or may not have some thoughts on the war in Afghanistan; that the Church opposes divorce; that the Pope opposes euthanasia; that the Pope opposes birth control; that the Church opposes the death penalty; that the Church opposes liberalizing gun control laws; and that the Pope opposes embryonic stem cell research. It is also fine with Catholic politicians who ardently support legalized abortion and embryonic stem cell research (or at least, most of the Church continues to give them Communion), and doesn’t seem to have a problem with prominent divorced and remarried Catholics, either.

American Catholics have, by and large, embraced the Culture of Death, gleefully, without reservation — yet still largely believe that they love life in all of its forms.

Who would contradict them? The priest who gives them Communion regardless of what they do? Who remains silent as his pews of wriggling children become pews of families of three? The Bishops who spend more public energy on whether or not Congress is passing immigration reform to allow more Central Americans citizenship than whether those Central Americans are some of Planned Parenthood’s target demographic? During the intercessionary prayers, one might occasionally hear an anodyne For the protection of life from conception to natural death, let us pray to the Lord. One will never hear For the souls of those women who have procured abortions, for the doctors who have performed them, for the men who have paid for them, all of whom are in danger of Hell and who cannot now partake of Communion without absolution, let us pray to the Lord. They’re more likely to hear That the leaders of our country ensure that everyone has enough to eat, thereby suggesting that the noble goal of ensuring that everyone is fed is of greater or equal importance to the dogmatically defined goal of ensuring that everyone has a chance to breathe. The average Catholic, who bothers to attend Mass, might reasonably conclude that Mario Cuomo’s famous speech is basically Church teaching.

There is a great deal wrong with this understanding, as a matter of degree, kind, and fact; but the only time one could reasonably expect the Conference of Catholic Bishops, or indeed, even a plurality of their number, to so much as raise a peep in protest would be when a Catholic politician affirmatively and explicitly misrepresent Church teachings to provide political cover for herself. The road to Hell may be paved with the skulls of bishops, as Archbishop St. John Chrysostom once quipped, but the path of scandal is lined with their backbones.

And that brings us back to Notre Dame and President Obama.

When Notre Dame announced that President Obama would be its commencement speaker and receive an honorary law degree, a number of publications noted, more as a curiosity than anything else, that in 2004, the American Catholic Bishops reached yet another opportunity to demonstrate their spinelessness by issuing a document called “Catholics in Political Life.” As Jody Bottum has noted, the relevant document merely affirmatively requires Catholic universities not to be party to the sin of scandal:

“Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles,” the bishops agreed [emphasis in the original]. “[Such people] should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

Do not commit the sin of teaching that something evil is in fact good. In the context of Catholic moral teaching, this is roughly as controversial as the True Presence in the Host. Or at least, it should be.

Notre Dame, doing what the vast majority of Catholic colleges and universities in this country are by nature inclined to do, basically informed its bishop, John D’Arcy, that it would nevertheless honor a man whose only core principle appears to be that a woman is entitled to a dead baby. There was a great deal of media coverage of the bishop’s decision to protest at Notre Dame, and to join in angry condemnations. What there wasn’t, was reporting on the bishop’s decision to order Fr. Jenkins, the university’s president, to disinvite President Obama. It’s not as if that particular tool is not in Bishop D’Arcy’s toolkit; absent some esoteric exceptions, the conduct and discipline of priests in a diocese lie directly in a bishop’s plenary authority.

We heard a great deal, mostly from Notre Dame and its more lackwitted defenders, about how having an uncompromising proponent of legalized abortion and research on tiny human beings stand with the de facto imprimatur of the Catholic Church behind him would foster a dialogue. (“Dialogue” is infinitely preferable to “action.”) What we got, of course, was a Catholic stage for President Obama to explain that abortion involves hard choices, and we should be prepared to simply accept that the murder of the unborn will always be legal. It was always going to be thus. Father Jenkins (whose dialogue with the advocate of the Culture of Death used the word “abortion” all of once) knew it. All of those nominally Catholic supporters of abortion and Barack Obama who wanted to win this round of the Church’s Kulturkampf knew it. And Bishop D’Arcy knew it.

I do not know Bishop D’Arcy. For all I know, he is a man good and true, aghast at the conflation of Catholic honor on a man who has spent his whole public career defending the execution of the most vulnerable. What I know is that he either believed for some reason that he lacked the jurisdiction to order a priest in his diocese to avoid the sin of scandal, or refused to exercise that authority. I suspect it’s the latter.

Today, he has allowed American Catholics to fully appreciate that the center of American Catholic life is not in Notre Dame, or in their home parishes, but rather in Washington, D.C. It’s a revelation that has been decades in coming, and that has the fingerprints of the majority of the American Catholic hierarchy of decades on it. That message is writ large every time a Catholic politician explains that he is personally opposed to the slaughter of the tiniest humans of all, but that he is an adamant proponent of its legality. It is fixed in stone every time that politician’s bishop turns away rather than fighting.

In that – moral cowardice or not – lies the seed of the end of the American Catholic Church as we’ve known it for centuries. The roots have sprouted, and the first shoots are showing above ground. It’s a shame the Bishops haven’t realized it yet.

Christopher Badeaux is a Senior Editor of The New Ledger.