Abstract

At the close of the Second Vatican Council modernist theologians, priests and scholars began building a future church based on neotheology. The Americandemocratic ideal of civic government was seen as the inspiration for Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II document on religious liberty. Under the banner ofJohn Courtney Murray's "American Proposition," dissident Catholics spent three decades laying the foundation for an American Catholic Church. Today the post-Christian American geography has scant tolerance for authority or hierarchy. The tenets and methodologies of the American church point to the future of Catholicism in America unless faithful Catholics defend orthodoxy.