SDG here (not Jimmy) with some musings on the trend of falling church attendance, especially among Catholics..
In a combox discussion below about post-Vatican II liturgical changes, a reader suggested that post-Vatican II liturgical changes were responsible for a massive decline in Catholic church attendance. Of course church attendance has fallen everywhere, not just among Catholics — but another reader argued that Catholics have fallen away at much greater rates than their non-Catholic neighbors, implying that the fault must lie with changes in the Church:
The Church was in ascendancy until all of these shenanigans started up around Vatican II. Now? Decline in many fronts…
So what is the cause? Protestant church attendance went down by about 5-10% in the last 40 years, Catholics are down by over 60%.
Now, I’m not a sociologist. I suspect the second reader’s statistical factoid is misleading, for reasons that I may or may not touch on in a follow-up post or in the combox. Granted the statistic, though, or at least the general point behind it, I can think of a few possible factors that could contribute to such a disparity, though I don’t pretend to know what "the cause" is.
What I can say is this: Granted that the decline in church attendance has hit the Catholic Church harder than Protestant churches, it doesn’t follow that the basis for this disparity must be rooted solely in harmful changes within the Catholic Church. On the contrary, I think it is very likely that two very important factors involve ways in which the Catholic Church has not changed while the culture — including Protestant culture — has drifted further into error.
Let’s review a little history. Other than Vatican II and the 1969 missal, what other cultural changes have taken place from the 1960s onward?
Here are a few: The sexual revolution. The Pill. No-fault divorce. The Playboy Philosophy. The Me Generation. The evolution of serial monogamy. The DINK culture. The rise of what is only half facetiously called the "starter marriage."
Now, what are the most widely criticized and resisted teachings of the Catholic Church today? Here are two:
1. Divorce and remarriage.
2. Contraception.
To these two we could also add an obvious third, abortion, although there the Protestant culture is more divided, with strong areas of ongoing resistance to abortion within the Evangelical community. On the subjects of divorce and remarriage and contraception, on the other hand, the Catholic Church stands essentially alone against the culture.
Say what you like about the liberality of American marriage tribunals. The fact remains that in the Catholic Church it is still a whole heck of a lot harder to get divorced and remarried and keep on receiving communion as a Catholic in good standing than it is in any other church or ecclesial community. On this subject, what has changed over the last four decades is not the Church’s essential teaching, but the culture at large.
In an age in which skyrocketing divorce rates and multiple marriages are increasingly the norm, the Church’s ongoing fidelity to her essential teaching seems increasingly onerous and unrealistic. No other church or ecclesial community imposes the array of time-consuming, bureaucratic and potentially costly obstacles upon divorced members seeking to enter or having already entered into new unions. The Church does this out of fidelity to Jesus Christ, who declared that he who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, but the world grows ever deafer to this declaration.
As for contraception, if anything it is probably an even bigger issue. As prevalent as divorce and remarriage have become, contraception is ubiquitous, literally taken for granted. The question in our contraceptive culture is not whether to contracept, but only which type(s) of contraception to use. (The mere fact that one particular type of oral pharmaceutical has an undisputed and unambiguous claim to the definite term "The Pill" itself speaks volumes.)
Although surveys suggest that many Catholics are willing to keep coming to Mass in spite of dissenting from the Church’s teaching in both theory and practice, it remains a major impediment to fully appropriating and embracing one’s Catholic identity. It is a wedge driving untold Catholics to qualify their acceptance of the Church’s teaching and pastoral authority, making it easier to dissent and distance themselves on other issues and finally to abandon the Church altogether.
On a fundamental level, whatever mistakes and questionable decisions may have been made within the Church in the 1960s and beyond, on these two issues it is what the Church has done right that has pushed away some who might not have been pushed away in Protestant churches.
This isn’t to say that mistakes and questionable decisions haven’t made both issues a bigger stumbling-block when they need to be. For instance, I know a couple seeking full membership in the Church who have been trying to get an anullment hearing in another country for several years. Not just the Church’s teaching, but the imperfections of the Church’s leadership obstruct their way.
Nor am I claiming that liturgical changes in the 1960s and beyond — both authorized and otherwise — haven’t been factors at all.
I’m simply noting that the factors are complex, the social changes over the last few decades are complex, the issues are complex. We can’t simply conclude that if more people are falling away from the Church, the only possible explanation is limited to what the Church is doing wrong. At least in some cases, it may be what the Church is doing right.
Many disciples stopped following Jesus after his "hard sayings" in John 6, saying, "Who can accept this?" The same dynamic is at work today.
