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As the two of them walk across St. Peter’s Square, bystanders stop Kerry every few steps to bemoan his defeat in the presidential election just a few months before. Some of these admirers – including a few Italian priests – drape themselves enthusiastically over Kerry’s lanky frame for group snapshots.

Then a single priest stops Kerry and Durbin. He warns Kerry that he will have to answer, perhaps in hell, for his position on abortion.

That priest is from Minnesota.

How did we get here? And are we stuck?

Unraveling the meaning of this vignette requires attention to three interlocking narratives. The first is the story of the once-happy but now troubled marriage between Catholics and the Democratic Party. The second is the history of the fight over public access not to abortion, but to birth control. The third is the emergence of a new generation of bishops, priests and lay intellectuals, suspicious of both theological and political liberalism, and eager to take a more adversarial posture toward modern society.

The first story of Catholics and Democrats is the most familiar. Most Catholics, clustered along the East Coast and in the Great Lakes region, voted Democratic in presidential elections for most of the 20th century, an alliance jumpstarted by Al Smith’s failed 1928 presidential campaign and cemented by Franklin Roosevelt’s charisma, the early programs of his New Deal, and his sympathy for U.S. workers. (Roosevelt thrilled Catholic activists by quoting from Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical on the economy, Quadragesimo anno, at a rally in Detroit during the final days of the 1932 campaign.)

Many Catholic voters drifted toward the popular Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, but a remarkable 78 percent voted for Catholic war hero John Kennedy in 1960. As late as 1968, two of the three Democratic candidates for president, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, were serious Catholics on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and support from white Catholics in the North almost pushed the eventual Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, past Richard Nixon.

As Howard Dean recently put it, “The Democratic Party was built on four pillars-the Roosevelt intellectuals, the Catholic Church, labor unions and African Americans.” (Dean ignores white Southerners, the most reliable members of the pre-civil-rights era Democratic Party, but the observation is accurate for the party in the North.)

George McGovern proved incapable of sustaining this Catholic backing in 1972, in part because the Democratic Party in the heady years between 1968 and 1972 became associated with a cultural liberalism that some Catholic voters, especially working-class whites, found unsettling. (Humphrey, during the bitter days of the 1972 Democratic primaries, inaccurately but effectively tarred McGovern as favoring “abortion, acid and amnesty [for Vietnam era draft evaders].”)

Much of this uneasiness with the national Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s revolved around race, with working-class white Catholics appalled by Democratic support for forced busing programs to alleviate racial imbalance in the public schools, and suspicious of efforts to integrate lily-white (and heavily Catholic) construction and trade unions.

The sympathy for African-American civil rights displayed by many priests and nuns in the late 1960s evoked among some white Catholics a raw sense of betrayal. One segregationist priest in Chicago, defying his archbishop and the head of his religious order, became an alderman as an advocate for the “forgotten minority” of white homeowners. J. Anthony Lukas’s study of the busing crisis in Boston, Common Ground, pivoted on the role of the church, attempting to mediate between Catholic politicians and judges eager to end racial segregation (but often themselves living in suburban enclaves), and working-class white Catholics often incapable of welcoming African Americans, even African-American Catholics, into their midst.

As the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s ebbed, abortion took center stage. But not right away. Until the early 1970s most Democrats seemed more conservative than Republicans on abortion. Republican governors – including Nelson Rockefeller in New York and William Milliken in Michigan – signed or advocated laws loosening state restrictions on abortion. By contrast, Sen. Edward Kennedy assured his constituents as late as 1971 that “abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life.” George McGovern’s first choice for running mate in 1972, Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, held pro-life views as did McGovern’s eventual running mate, Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver.

Roe v. Wade made everything more partisan. The unexpectedly sweeping consequences of the 1973 ruling – eliminating most state restrictions on the procedure, with ...