Where is your sense of humor...of irony....of absurdity? An "alliance" between, say, Archbishop Chaput  and Jerry Falwell Jr. or between Cardinal Burke and Rev. Jeffress is fodder for humor. Our Irish, Italian, Croation, and Polish Catholic-American great grandparents could not imagine such a shotgun marriage of convenience with those who mocked, degraded, and demeaned them as "anti-American" and "instruments of Rome" who "put on a magic show every Sunday morning." To use your word, they'd see it as "pathetic." To align so strongly because some Catholics agree with the evangelical right on sex, drugs, and rock and roll (and immigration and taxes) is to diminish and trivialize our priorities and our focus. Have we gone from papists to pawns in just a few generations? Norman Vincent Peale would be happy to see how easily we were taken in. And it took only a few social and cultural issues to do it.