[Maximilian]

This is a brilliant analysis. John Allen gets better every time he writes. There is an emerging fault line here which may be below the surface today, but which will grow more visible as time goes on. Alasdair Macintyre is usually ahead of his time, so his critique of Western culture is likely to be prescient. One fact that should have been mentioned in the article: Macintyre was formerly a Marxist, that's why his attitude of opposition to bourgeois culture comes naturally to him.

First Things has published numerous articles on all the topics mentioned. They've written a lot about Alasdair Macintyre and the revival of Thomism. They've been very pro "Whig Catholics" Weigel and Novak. And for a while there was a running feud between Neuhaus and Schindler. First Things has an excellent search engine:

http://www.firstthings.com/menus/search.html

[ultima ratio]

"'I trace the scandals to the corrosive effect of American culture on the Church,' Kraynak said. 'It started with the sexual revolution, plus the unwillingness of the hierarchy to assert its authority in the proper way. They more or less concluded that we share with liberalism a concern for social justice, so sexual ethics aren’t so important.'”

Kraynak has it backwards. The Church is not the victim here. Vatican II allowed the destruction, in effect, of her own immunological system. This opening to the world led to the influence of American culture and thus to the scandals. The Church herself was to blame. The cure is not to search for the blame outside herself, but to analyze her own failure.