The political history of Catholics in Europe and the West is full of "social Catholics" who embraced authoritarianism - Fascism, Nazism, Francoism, and so on - while claiming to defend a traditional idea of society, of the family, and of religion. The trajectories of 21st-century Church in the USA demonstrate that "social Catholicism" and the democratic, constitutional culture of Catholicism are two different things. The paper will address the collapse or absence of a democratic-constitutional culture within US Catholicism which has always been much more focused on "social Catholicism", and it will analyze how the theological reactions to major historical caesurae (WW2, Cold War, 9/11) explains the constitutional agnosticism of US Catholic hierarchies.