The Catholic Church lost its 'saltness' when it merely move pedophile Priests from Parish to Parish, never taking the freaks out of the opportunity to molest children. The past thirty years have been hallmarked by the feckless response of the Catholic Church to the growing holocaust of abortion on demand. Tongue wagging doesn't deter the forces of Satan with their blood lust. The Church carrys a great deal of the blame for the current state of evil in America and the degeneration of the society. Personally, I also believe the blood of innocent children is also soaking into the vestments.
What horrid truths.
The clergy fell into a habit in the 1960s of thinking along liberal political lines on issues like civil rights and the Vietnam War. By the 1970s and 1980s, the church in America had been captured by "liberalism." There was a Liberation Theology craze. Catholicism was eroded by many factors. The move to the suburbs, feminism, the decline of the Catholic intellectual element in Catholic colleges and universities. The homosexualization of the seminaries. Bernardin presided over this quagmire as the darling of the national media.
American neo-modernism is...well, very American. When the clergy abandoned Catholicism and a supernatural/sacramental view of reality in favor of politically-oriented styles of liberalism and socialism, the battle for the culture was lost. There was very little authentic Catholicism left among the clergy.
As for the liberals among the laity, the John Kerry and Ted Kennedy types don't even know what Catholicism is or what a Catholic culture would be like. They were NEVER even part of it in any remote sense. The great absurdity (and tragedy) of American Catholic liberalism is that they don't even know what they have lost.