Face it, we've lost; Catholics in an alien culture.

Even when the signs are right under our noses, clamoring for our attention, most of us don't like to admit we are in grave trouble. For to admit this would be to recognize that life can no longer go on as usual. And while life as usual may not be the most pleasant thing in the world, at least it is something we have grown used to. This is the condition known to pop psychology as denial.

Thus many people refuse to recognize that their kids are on drugs, their spouses are cheating, their bosses are ready to fire them, they have developed a grave illness, etc.

American Catholicism is like that. It has long been in a state of denial as to how hostile the dominant culture has become in this country; for if it faces facts it will be forced to make a radical change in its way of living. Not all Catholics are in denial, of course, but the average Catholic is; and this includes many priests and bishops.

Life for the Catholic church in the United States hasn't been terribly pleasant for the past thirty years. Externally we have been surrounded by a culture that is increasingly permissive and antireligious. Internally we have been faced with lower rates of Mass attendance, a diminishing number of priests and nuns, and the shrinkage of Catholic schools, not to mention a series of grave sexual scandals.

Unsatisfactory as this condition may be, we have grown used to it. (For instance, I myself hardly wince nowadays when I hear about one more accused priest.) The painful adjustments we had to go through to get to this point were bad enough. Who has the stomach for another set of painful adjustments, even if someone can promise us we'll be better off once the agony of readjustment is finished?

Besides, Catholicism is what the sociologists call a religion of the "church" type, not of the "sect" type, which means it doesn't draw sharp lines between itself and the "world," doesn't like doing battle with the dominant culture. Of course it can fight when driven into a corner, as it did (to its glory) in Communist Poland. But it prefers accommodation or, if not exactly accommodation, then at least biding its time, as it did (to its disgrace) in Nazi Germany. Jehovah's Witnesses find it easy to reject the secular world; Catholics find it terribly hard.

Therefore we tend to tell ourselves that things, while they could be better, are not so bad. In other words, we deny.

But the times are bad indeed, and they'll probably grow worse. A generation ago the command posts of American culture (press, entertainment industry, universities) were hijacked by the forces of secularism. By "the forces of secularism" I mean those who have no religious convictions (except, of course, the conviction that religion is a waste of time) and precious few moral convictions (except the deeply held conviction that we must do our own thing and be quite non-judgmental about others who do their own thing). Over the last three decades they have created a public culture profoundly inimical to Christianity, pushing religion toward the margins of society, where it is allowed to survive as a "private" matter.

No matter how little Catholics may like this new American culture, we cannot escape its influence. It is the way of life in which we live and move and have our being. Worse, it is the culture in which our children and grandchildren grow up. They breathe it in every day of the week, a kind of second-hand philosophical smoke that pollutes heart and mind. Defenders of junk TV remind us that television sets come equipped with an "off" button. Unfortunately, the culture does not have an "off" button; it remains always turned on. Parents may try to protect their children against America's increasingly anti-Christian way of life, but their capacity to protect is very limited. They lock the doors, but the thing gets in through windows and chimneys.

For more than twenty years the legal tolerance of virtually unlimited abortion has stood as a clear sign--indeed a great big flashing billboard with bells and whistles--that the dominant culture is the enemy of our religious beliefs. Yet for a long time most Catholics (myself included) didn't know how to read the sign, and a lot still don't. We agreed (at least many of us did) that the constitutionalization of abortion was quite a bad thing; but we regarded this as an aberration, an exception to the rule. At heart, we told ourselves, America is sound; the abortion regime is untypical, a deviation from the yellow brick road that the nation normally follows.

For those Catholics who have hither-to been unable to read the signs of the times, perhaps certain current developments will serve as a wake-up call. In early March the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declared assisted suicide to be a fundamental constitutional right. In early April the Appeals Court of the Second Circuit rejected as unconstitutional a New York law banning assisted suicide. Any day now Hawaii, either through its Supreme Court or its legislature (acting under threat from the Court), is expected to legalize homosexual marriage. When Hawaii does this, the other forty-nine states may be obliged to recognize gay marriages made in Hawaii. And all this in a nation in which constitutional rights are seen as moral rights.

And so our children and grandchildren--whom we had hoped to see grow up Catholic, or if not Catholic then at least Christian, or if not Christian then at least with a grasp of the basic principles of natural morality--will find themselves bombarded by the messages of a dominant culture which tells them that abortion is morally OK, that suicide is morally OK, that homosexual (plus bisexual) conduct is morally OK, and that the old-fashioned definition of marriage (a lifelong partnership between man and woman, chiefly for the purpose of begetting and raising children) has been consigned to the scrapheap of useless antiquities. And if all this is so, what else must also be so?

It is becoming harder and harder to remain in denial.