From Jody Bottum in the Weekly Standard. His point? The Catholic hierarchy may be politically ineffective, but Catholicsm is contributing much to legal and political discourse:

So why all the agitation? The 2004 presidential election saw endless talk about the malignant effect of the Catholic hierarchy’s preaching against abortion: editorials in the New York Times, talk show after talk show on television, long analyses in opinion magazines. But the fact remains that the vote in the political district of every cardinal in the United States, from Los Angeles to Boston, was won by pro-abortion politicians, usually overwhelmingly. George W. Bush, as the candidate who opposed Roe v. Wade, may have captured the vote of Catholics as a whole, but John Kerry, the candidate in favor of legalized abortion, won all the cardinals’ home towns.

The current fear about Catholics cannot be drawn from the Church’s direct political effect, for that well has gone bone dry. In New York City politics, the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was once called "the Powerhouse," but no one has used the name in a generation. Not a single prominent pro-abortion Catholic politician has been successfully brought to heel by the bishops in decades, and for two presidential election cycles, Catholic voters have been more or less indistinguishable from the general run of American voters.

And yet, in another way, everyone who seems so agitated–from the New York Times editorial page to Americans United for Separation of Church and State–is right to worry about the nomination of a fifth Catholic to the Supreme Court. Neither John Roberts nor Samuel Alito admitted in his Senate hearings a willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. That may have been merely good confirmation strategy, but it is also possible they will prove, as Anthony Kennedy did, unwilling in the end to pull the trigger. The fact that Alito’s mother told a reporter her son opposes abortion is no more dispositive than the fact that John Roberts’s wife once held a position in a pro-life organization.

But both Roberts and Alito are products of a Catholic intellectual life that has flowered in the years since the Court imposed legalized abortion on the nation. Compelled to moral seriousness by the urgency of the pro-life cause and granted a surprising public prominence by the collapse of the old Protestant mainline, post-ethnic Catholic thinkers have formed an exciting and powerful rhetoric in which to talk about public affairs in a modern democracy. You can see it among an increasing number of professors and journalists. You can see it, perhaps most of all, among lawyers and judges. You can even see it among nominees to the Supreme Court.

That is hardly the same thing as success for the Catholic Church. But it is success, of a sort, for Catholicism.