"That isn't the "Latin system," so much as it is a peculiar mentality that has grown up in the West, and is especially bad in this country."
Do you suppose this is a result of the immigrant history of the Catholic Church in America? Just yesterday a priest observed to me that even within the past 100 years the parish priest was sort of the connection between the immigrants in the parish and the protestant authorities around them. Often he was the best educated and likely spoke English. On the other hand, this is the same experience of Orthodoxy here and the mentality about which we are speaking didn't develop there and of course it wouldn;t explain the problems of Catholicism in the rest of the First World.
I don't know for sure, but the Catholic Church in this country was very strongly influenced by the Irish, so it may be partly an Irish thing. Of course, the Irish had to keep their faith alive under intense persecution for a couple of centuries, and that may have led to an over-deferential tendency to "trust Father to do/know it".