American Catholicism has nowadays become one of the determinative factors in the universal Church. The Church in America is very dynamic. She is, of course, also characterized by tensions. On one hand, there are groups who are critical of the Church and advocate a more rational and more democratic Christianity. But above all else there are quite new and vital religious manifestations, new religious communities are being formed who quite consciously aim at a complete fulfillment of the demands of religious life. They live this out of a great joy in their faith, also particularly intending to read again the Fathers and Thomas Aquinas, and to form their lives on what they read. This is a Church that is very strongly bringing to bear the vital element of religion: the courage to give one's life to and out of faith, in the service of faith. This is a Church that takes great responsibility in society through her considerable system of education and through her hospitals...
Nowadays...America, on one hand, provides secular fashions and slogans that spread throughout the world yet, on the other hand, also offers ecclesiastical models. What is certainly surprising about this is that these models do away with a Christianity that is seemingly modern but at the same time too rationalistic, insufficiently saturated with faith, and replace it with genuine impulses of faith and also typical forms of the life of faith...
I believe that it is particularly in the American sphere that people are taking up Catholicism as a whole and trying to relate it anew to the modern world.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God and the World, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002, 447-449.