"We pray," the reader says at holy mass. For the end of the world, vote-stealing, political corruption? For God's "loving embrace”? Russell Shaw's American Church. What would John the Baptist say?

Let’s see.

* Praying for peace is a good idea, but for an “end to violence” or even the specific “end to violence in Chicago”? Really? Who is kidding whom?

It’s like praying for the end of the world, which will be a wonderful thing, to be sure, with Jesus returning in glory. His earliest followers prayed for that. But we might add an Augustinian “not yet.”

How about “less violence”? Or “a few less killings on our mean streets”? Something we can take seriously without calling for an end to life as we know it.

* Among social-justice issues, why do we never hear about vote-stealing? Never stole one myself or saw one stolen — though sat as an observer at a West Side polling place as a reporter once in the ‘70s — at least not since the class-president election at Loyola U. in 1949, when I was sorely tempted. But I do read about it and at times work up some blue-ribbon indignation.

Point is, why not expand social-justice discussion to troubles behind the obvious troubles, poverty and the like, into matters like political corruption, which does poor people no good and like everything else affects them most of all. Vast idea there.

* Another vast idea, here barely outlined of course, is whether to reform church language. For instance, we are urged to pray for the deceased who “rests in the loving embrace” of God.

That’s soft language, romance-novel stuff. “May he (or she or they) rest in peace” works nicely, for the Latin “Requiescat in pace,” R.I.P. Do we need this loving-embrace talk? One cringes.

* Finally, something not half-baked, a book from the prolific Russell Shaw, #22 from him — the ambitiously, alarmingly titled American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius Press), in which he makes an extended argument for a church that does not fit in.

He traces a hundred-plus-year-old conflict between Americanizers and difference-cherishers. Orestes Brownson, a lay convert, in 1857 urged extreme caution, declaring “the American character . . . hostile to Catholicity.”

His friend Isaac Hecker, a priest and convert, on the other hand considered the nation ripe for mass conversion and founded the Paulists for that purpose.

The trouble with Americans, said Brownson, was their “spirit of independence, aversion to authority, pride, overwhelming conceit,” and anti-Catholic prejudice. Hecker didn’t think so and remained convinced of the benefits the church might gain from American democracy and freedom.

The conflict was won by Americanizers over the next 50 years - very much through the leadership of James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. But it has persisted. Vatican 2 says something, its “spirit” says another, depending on which camp you’re in, Shaw says. The “spirit” camp predominates, he says, citing widespread embracing by Catholics of the American worldview.

For today’s Americanizers, he says, what matters is less what the council said than the saying itself. It’s a view of the council-as-event that heralds a “new day” of Catholic life and belief.

Shaw is clearly not in that camp. Instead, he wants “an infusion of new thinking and new spirit” - nothing organizational, mind you - urging Catholics to adopt a beseiged if not seige mentality as regards the America around them.

Everybody has a vocation, he proclaims, lay people especially. Each is to imitate Jesus “by the crucifixion of the flesh . . . daily acts of mortification” and by these and other actions is to abandon oneself “into the hands of a God whose love is a living flame.”

How many buyers he gets for that package is anybody’s guess. But there it is, for him or her to take or leave.

Come to think, it’s prophetic. What is it John the Baptist called the crowds who came to him in the desert to be baptized, as Luke tells us, chapter 3, verse seven, “You brood of vipers”?

Are we that bad?