In a 1973 issue of the Catholic periodical America, Timothy E. O'Connell wrote: "Roman Catholics's parent-immigrants believed that the political order could be implicitly trusted, that it would not let them down. . . .We were naive. We were foolish. Indeed, we were unfair to the civil order. For in our childish faith we expected that order to do more than it was able. We expected it to mediate in an infallible way the will of God for our lives. . . . We expected the government to guarantee a comfortable meld of 'Christian' and 'American.' That it just can't do. . . . if the Supreme Court has not killed Catholic civil religious, it has at least struck it a serious blow."

Source: America, 128 (2 June 1973): 517.

Conservative Opposition.

Not all its members were Catholics, of course. Conservative Protestants also had reservations about the end of legal restraints on abortion. The...