My experience has been the opposite of yours. Half of my family is Catholic, and all of them are very liberal Democrats. My comments about the “good” of abortion on a different thread come from some of them. Some on my wife's side do not talk to me because I am to “orthodox”. Now that is a rather select sample group, and if you add into the two dioceses of which I have contact with (Davenport and Peoria), it is rather interesting to see where and who has iron in the spine.
I pray that the night won't fall. I fear that it it will. Either way, here I stand, in the shadow of the cross and at the door of the open tomb. I can do no other. So help me God.
BTW, as you may know, Lincoln, Nebraska has been blessed for some time with Fabian Bruskewitz as bishop. He is one of the very finest bishops in the US and probably in the world. I am familiar with Bishop Jenky of Peoria whose diocese is the one just south of the Rockford Diocese where I live. Martin Amos is the bishop of Davenport, Iowa, but I know nothing about him other than that he was appointed in 2006. Do you have an opinion of his service as bishop?
As to the liberalism you have witnessed among Catholic members of your family and other Catholics, there is no denying that the Roman Catholic Church in the United States suffered in many places from poor catechesis and trendiness uber alles among many clergy, educators and infernal laity who had convinced themselves that they were somehow charged with bringing about a new form of Catholicism that would make the Reformation seem timid and quite pro-Catholic by comparison.
The National (anti-)Catholic Reporter (ncronline.com) eagerly carries the infernal opinions of these aged and bitterly disappointed radicals who are dying off and have failed to recruit younger folks to their ranks (whatever they may pretend). Pacifism. Surrendermonkeyism. Feminazism. Enthusiasm for all things "gay" or otherwise perverted in sexual relations. Lamentations that pro-abort politicians are barred from the Eucharist by increasing numbers of American bishops and that no one is punished for not implementing Marxism here and everywhere now. Demands for feminist clergy, no doubt to be followed by demands for lesbian clergy and openly proud homosexual clergy while simultaneously using the homosexual abuse of children by priests as a stick to beat the bishops and the Vatican. Many correspondents responding to NCR articles proudly proclaim their actual apostasy to protest what they regard as an ever more reactionary hierarchy.
As the more recently appointed bishops lead the Church in the US back to actual Catholicism, it will take a while for the old time religion to conquer the worst "progressive" termites at the grass roots level and convert the worshipers in the pews and their children to more sensibly conservative Catholicism than the substitute that prevailed for forty years or so.
Apropos of your family in Germany, I would very much like to see the Vatican canonize such Lutheran martyrs of Jesus Christ as Dietrich Bonhoeffer as saints. They became saints without any involvement by the RCC but it would not hurt for the RCC to recognize the obvious under the usual conditions for canonization. The faith of Bonhoeffer was as heroic as that of any modern saint.
As to your daughter, there is a work of Holocaust era history by Oxford Professor Martin Gilbert who is Jewish. The book is The Righteous and may still be available in hardcover. It is Professor Gilbert's historical reconstruction of what Catholics and other Christians did to thwart Hitler's ambitions for the genocide of the Jew and particularly to protect Jewish infants and children. I trust that each and every Christian of whatever faith will follow that example if and when the dark curtain of the tyranny of the AntiChrist has rung down on civilization. You and I may be too well known for what we are to escape the all too common fate of the early Christians. Our offspring and their offspring will live through the heroism that will rise to their defense.