It's not just American Catholicism, it's Irish/Anglo Catholicism.  This trend can also be seen in how the child abuse problem was handled.  It was all about laws and how to get around them.  Mental reservation was the coping strategy to maintain the facade that all was perfectly fine in the Catholic kingdom.  If any kind of discernment had had any value at all, things would have been very different.  Unfortunately, discernment was not a highly valued spiritual skill in Anglo seminaries....and neither was truth or transparency.