American Catholicism has a lot of problems. No one knows why anyone would describe themselves as Catholic, since it's a description of someone else's allegiance in another language by another race from before the time of Christ, but then so is Orthodox and so is Mitzvah, a Mitzvah is a Catholic, but a Jew and an Italian are still two different races. Catholicism and asking about someone's loyalty are both touchy (They both mean the same thing, but who's religion is loyalty to the state?) Most people forget if they ever knew that Christianity was the first nonstate religion in the west, across the board from total monotheism to varied levels of polytheism. That there was more than one tutelar deity in pagan Rome before Christianity with monotheistic trinitarianism was adopted by Constantine is understood by a lot of people, but it gets lost that only countries with state religions like the Italians, Greeks and Israelis would really call a church that, unless they were British, and "Anglican" also means something else, (Use your entitlement to the Department of Imagination).
The problem with a Catholic or not Catholic dialogue in the Unted States is that if you tell someone they're specifically not Catholic, you're calling the person a traitor in Latin. I would try not to get into that. If I really thought that little of someone's national status, I would be unlikely to say, "You are neither Catholic, nor Orthodox, nor a Mitzvah", because I don't consider traitors very intellectual.
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