The Church confronts (Post?) Modernity

I'm reading Catholicism and modernity: Confrontation or capitulation? by James Hitchcock. Written in the late 1970s in the wake of Vatican II. He writes as an orthodox Catholic facing the growing liberalisation of his faith from within the Church.

There are striking parallels in the story of the Episcopalian demise in the US and Canada and the woes of the Uniting Church in Australia.

The heart of the problem is a failure of nerve in confronting a culture that is hostile to the Christian faith. Hitchcock quotes TS Eliot who said of liberalism that,

[It] tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite.

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized by a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, this history will be repeated in the postmodern world by the stream of the emerging church described by Ed Stetzer as "Revisionists". The scenery has changed but not the story.