Disappearing and dying off, according to this assessment from the Wall Street Journal. And the author suggests that this isn’t actually a good thing:

Where is the second generation of brilliant progressive Catholic theologians? There are plenty of liberal lay Catholics. The church’s ban on artificial birth control is nearly a dead letter, a majority of Catholics say they believe their church should ordain women, and 40% have no moral objections to abortion, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. But dissident Catholicism seems to have lost steam as an intellectual movement, and not only because the issues relating to sex and papal authority that originally sparked Catholic dissidents have not changed in nearly 50 years.

The first-generation dissidents were products of a strong and confident traditional Catholic culture against which they rebelled, one whose intellectual standards grounded them in the faith they later came to question. Sister Schneiders, for example, earned four degrees from Catholic institutions, including the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Yet most Catholics of her generation have not passed on the tenets of their faith to their children–the offspring of the Vatican II generation tend either to be churchless or not to go to church–or, in the case of academics, to their students. It’s hard to rebel when you don’t even know what you are rebelling against.

Read the rest. I think the author is on to something.