(Emily Mangiaracina/LifeSiteNews) — A newly published secular study found that Vatican II “triggered a decline” in worldwide Catholic Mass attendance relative to religious service attendance of other religions, including Protestant Christianity.
By examining the religious service attendance rates for 66 countries as far back as 1920, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that “compared to other countries, Catholic countries experienced a steady decline in the monthly adult religious service attendance rate starting immediately after Vatican II” in 1965, the final year of the council.
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As Phil Lawler has noted, the findings of NBER regarding Vatican II’s effects on Mass attendance are noteworthy because NBER is a “heavyweight” economic research institution with “no dog in the fight” of Catholicism’s internal debates.
Here are two paragraphs from the referenced Phil Lawler piece:
Numbers cannot tell the whole story about declining Mass attendance, of course. But in their analysis, the NBER authors conclude that the data are “consistent with religion modeled as a club good…and with the view that Vatican II shattered the perception of an immovable, truthholding [sic] Church…” They also make the interesting observation that “Vatican II’s depressing influence on the number of nuns led to a sharp decline in fertility among Catholics because of the loss of childbearing support,” and the collapse of the parochial school system.
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Setting those issues aside, though—and again, the NBER authors do their best to avoid the intramural Catholic debates—the paper concludes that Vatican II was the event that precipitated the decline. “For our purposes, the main point is that, with Vatican II unanticipated, changes in religious-service attendance rates would not have occurred earlier in anticipation of Vatican II, and the subsequent changes in attendance would have been unanticipated.” Furthermore, “the decline in attendance is specific to Catholicism, to which Vatican II would directly apply.”
