By Francis X. Maier

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow, Thursday, May 23 at 8 PM Eastern, to EWTN for a new episode of 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss recent developments in the Church in Rome and in the U.S. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. And don't forget TCT's mid-year funding campaign is in full swing!

Now for today's column...

As I've noted here in the past, Georges Bernanos, author of The Diary of a Country Priest and Under Satan's Sun, is one of my favorite writers. The reasons are simple. He was profoundly Catholic. He had a keen sense of irony. And he was relentlessly candid. Honesty matters, and Bernanos never avoided it, because nothing good comes from evading or minimizing uncomfortable truths.

Candor marked all of his final works. Among them is an essay written in the aftermath of World War II (and collected here) titled "Why Freedom?" In it, he argued that "An inhuman civilization is, obviously, one that is based on a false or incomplete definition of man." And that, said Bernanos, was exactly what he saw taking shape.

Thanks to modern technologies and their power to shape thought, appetites, and opinion, modern man was creating a civilization "in the image of a prodigiously diminished and shrunken man, a man no longer made in the image of God, but in the image of a speculator - that is to say, of a man reduced to two states, both equally miserable, of consumer and taxpayer."

The result would inevitably be a crippled sense of our humanity and the need "above all to re-spiritualize man."

Bernanos wrote those words through the lens of his native French culture nearly eighty years ago. They're even more urgently relevant today in an American culture soaked in technological addictions that promise freedom, but too often bear fruit in a "diminished and shrunken" concept of man.

Americans have a genius for toolmaking and practical innovation rooted in our Protestant (Calvinist) and Enlightenment founding. We have a similar genius for dismissing the past and its wisdom. We define ourselves as a novus ordo seclorum, a "new order of the ages" - words stamped on the Great Seal of the United States.

But what does any of the above mean today for American Catholics? That's the question at the heart of Kenneth Craycraft's excellent new book Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America. Craycraft is a lawyer and Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Cincinnati's Mount St. Mary's Seminary and School of Theology. His command of both the law and Catholic beliefs gives him a uniquely valuable perspective on the American character. . .and how Catholics can (and can't) faithfully engage it.

Craycraft has a clear, lean style, and like Bernanos, he starts with some unvarnished facts: "Catholics in the United States today are liberal Protestants before we are anything else. To form our moral lives as Catholics is a constant battle to overcome the liberal Protestantism that we began to consume with our mother's milk." As a result, he argues, our political party affiliation can often be irrelevant because our culture is permeated by a false anthropology, an idea of humanity absent the image of God.

For Craycraft, "This anthropology is characterized by at least two elements: (1) radical personal autonomy and (2) an absolute commitment to individualism characterized by the language of 'individual rights' as the basic moral foundation (or indeed, for some, the only measure of moral action)."

The issues that divide America's right and left may have real substance, but the vocabulary of the debates is shaped by a closed system of classically liberal thought. In effect, "we speak a common language of liberalism with partisan accents." Thus,

Many of us American Catholics are liberals before we are Catholic. . .we subscribe to and pra...