The dissenting desperation of Catholic progressives...

... is analyzed at length by George Weigel in a National Review essay, "Desperate Churchmice":

Throughout this fairly rapid decline, progressive Catholicism's distinctive cultural marker has been its skepticism about the teaching authority of the Church: whether that teaching authority was formally and authoritatively addressing the ethics of human love, the suitability of women for Holy Orders, the uniqueness of Christ as universal savior, or the intrinsic evils of abortion and euthanasia. Thus it was another sign of the increasing incoherence of progressive Catholicism when several of its American paladins mounted a raucous defense of a "Note" — a kind of Vatican white paper — on international financial reform issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (PCJP) on October 24. It was an extraordinary exercise: The progressives depicted Benedict XVI as a senior chaplain to Occupy Wall Street, described the Note in such overwrought terms that the gullible might have thought this white paper shared in the charism of papal infallibility, and darkly suggested that those who disagreed with the Note's prescriptions were cafeteria Catholics, picking and choosing their doctrines to fit preexisting political tastes.

The irony of men such as the former editor of America, Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., and National Catholic Reporter blogger Michael Sean Winters promoting a notion of papal teaching authority more expansive than any imagined by the most wild-eyed traditionalist will not be lost on cognoscenti of ecclesiastical intrigue. This new notion of PCJP infallibility does, however, raise interesting questions — about the nature and modalities of Catholic teaching authority, about the organization of the Holy See, and about the state of Catholic progressivism in America. ...

Why the desperation? The progressives are losing; they know it, at some level; and because the idea of losing is inconceivable to those who have long imagined themselves on the right side of both political and ecclesiastical history, they tell themselves, and the rest of us, increasingly bizarre tales, like Lewis Carroll's White Queen teaching herself impossible things before breakfast. Ratzinger-as-Chaplain-to-OWS is thus a kind of desperate grasping for relevance at a moment of increasing progressivist irrelevance. They have lost inside the Church: The men and women in the growing religious orders, the men in the growing seminaries, the active younger laity, all look on progressive Catholicism as a kind of weird phenomenon of their parents' generation. And now they are losing publicly. Progressive Catholicism in America bet the farm on Barack Obama, and, as progressive Catholics begin to sense with horror that the administration is a train wreck about to happen, we may yet see even stranger tales told than that of Benedict the Left-Wing Activist.

Thomas Merton sensed the inherent implausibility of progressive Catholicism in the mid-1960s — despite his support of the civil-rights, anti-nuclear, and anti-Vietnam movements. In his student days at Columbia, Merton had known real Communists, and he wasn't much impressed with the juvenile leftism that swamped the Church in the wake of Vatican II. Merton put the complaint about progressive Catholicism and its furies about as well as it can be put in one of the "nonsense letters" he wrote to his old friend, the poet Robert Lax: "I am truly spry and full of fun, but am pursued by the vilifications of progressed Catholics. Mark my word man there is no uglier species on the face of the earth than progressed Catholics, mean, frivol, ungainly, inarticulate, venomous, and bursting at the seams with progress into the secular cities and Teilhardian subways. The Ottavianis was bad but these are infinitely worse. You wait and see."

Read the entire essay.