"Should Liberals Leave the Catholic Church?"

Joan Vennochi asks, in the Boston Globe:  "Every pronouncement from Pope Benedict XVI draws another line between official church doctrine and liberal ideology. When do liberals choose one side or the other? . . .  The church in Rome thinks in centuries, not in news cycles. It isn't budging.  Will liberals in America ever get the message?"

In my view, the piece is riddled with misplaced assumptions (i.e., that the Church's stances on disputed, controversial questions of social and economic policy are monolithically "conservative").  I suppose I am neither "liberal" (except in the sense that everyone is these days) nor a "liberal Catholic," but I found myself vicariously offended by the suggestion that Catholics who are liberals are Catholic only because of "nostalgia," and not because of a love of Christ and a hunger for the sacraments.  We sometimes see, on the "conservative" side of the Church an impulse, to find a purer place, somewhere in the catacombs, where there will be no more liturgical silliness or bad music or squishy discipline; similarly, Ms. Vennochi advises liberal Catholics to abandon the Church for a purer, more satisfying, "liberal ideology."  (It is interesting that Ms. Vennochi uses that word.  Why would anyone -- liberal or conservative -- prefer "ideology" to the word and presence of God?) 

My own sense -- based on many conversations here at MOJ and elsewhere -- is that Catholics who are liberals do not find this call attractive, or even comprehensible.  My own sense is that, for most Catholics who are liberals, their liberal stances reflect efforts to live out and apply the Faith; it is not that they believe the Church's performance is to be evaluated based on its consonance with "ideology" of any kind.

What do the folks at the Commonweal blog think, I wonder?  Mark?