Declining church attendance [Akin]

[Sarabande]

My guess is that the reader is correct and that this is one more example of the fact that Vatican II was a disaster for the Catholic Church in many ways. Take for another example, the support of family life since Vatican II. In the USA in 1930, there were about 9 marriage annulments total. But today it is running up to 60,000 and more in recent years. When you go from 9 marriage anulments per year in the USA to more than 60,000 marriage annulments per year in the USA, it is difficult to see how the Church has been supporting family life as much as it did in 1930.

60,000 annulments a year? I’m not saying you are wrong on this as I don’t know myself, but how did you get that info? If that is true, was a sad state we’re in.

That said, in the 1930s, we were just starting to go through a horrible Depression. During desperate times, people learn to stick together and they see what is most important. And on a practical standpoint, it wouldn’t make any sense for a woman to leave her husband if things were bad. They needed to stick together to survive. I’m not saying that this was always the case.

I wasn’t alive back then and my grandmother was just a young girl who didn’t really understand that things were terrible, but I’m sure the Church was very supportive of their flock. They had a lot more priests and religious back then who could tend to them. Today, we have much less and we are not suffering as much financially, although we are spiritually. I think the clergy sees that, but it is much harder for them, especially since more and more people don’t have “blind faith” or don’t have the foundation to make them truly understand what it means to be a Catholic/Christian.

we can’t just blame it all on Vatican II. As everyone on here pointed out, there were many factors. Perhaps the timing of the implementation of Vatican II was wrong. If it was done in the 50s or during a time of great distress like during the Depression or the 1940s and not in the turbulent 60s, the outcome may have been different and that more people would have been more true to it. (I’m one of the after products of VII, so I do know that a lot of people took advantage of the time period to do what they wanted to teach. Or they were just misguided.)

In a way, things that they did in the 70s and 80s were basically like experiments and everyone, especially the children of these generations were heavily affected. I mean, so many of my contemporaries no longer consider themselves Catholic or just “luke-warm” Catholics. So I agree with Al Masetti and other people on this forum that the basis was taken away. It’s not necessarily the fault of VII, but more so the people who implemented it. But again, there are many factors which contributed to the decline.

 

[4HisChurch]

So they got rid of the Baltimore Catechism and the memorization. And they got rid of not eating meat on Friday. And they got rid of a lot of other things.

And in place of those things, they substituted … nothing.

So we got rid of the memorization and now we have … nothing.

When I ask priests to explain Transsubstantiation, they say they can only preach from the pulpit; they are not allowed to teach.

More than one cradle Catholic has told me that the Consecrated Host is symbolic. They just don’t know about the Real Presence because they have not been told. They have not been taught. It has not been explained to them.

And I could go on and on.

We used those old practices … the devotions … the Holy Name Society … abstinence from meat on Fridays … and the Baltimore Catechism as the bases of learning the faith. Not the entirety, but a base on which more education could be based.

But now, there is nothing on which to base more education.

The base is all gone.

I whole heartedly agree with this. Unfortunately, many *priests *don’t agree with all the teachings of the Church. In the name of “pastoralism”, anything goes in the Church in the United States.

But, beyond that, I think that modern society is too pervasive an influence in everyone’s life. Sending one’s children to Catholic schools is no guarantee that they will get Church teaching anymore. It is also no guarantee that your children’s classmates or teachers have any idea what the Church teaches either. If a kid watches any television, the worldly values that pervade are almost impossible to get around.

Add to that the teaching vacuum that is today’s Church and you get predictable results.

 

[StBrendan]

Let’s look at this culturally (this is a basic reduction of work by Kevin Seasoltz, Michael Clay, Pecklers, Searle, Nick Wagner, and others); the word-metaphor or “con-scire” is my own:

Classical Culture:
Founding of the Church;
knowledge was “con-scire”: knowing together
Arian heresy drove the role of Christ as mediator from Church out of fear that he would be seen as a lesser; priest took on mediation role; class divisions increased between priesthood and laity; religious/clerical life seen as heavenly because of vows of obedience, poverty, and celibacy, people as lowly because they did what they want, worked and toiled to succeed in the world, and had sex; divide grows–abstract reality transcends real life, Jesus becomes too distant for the laity, God is seperate and other: transcendent; priests become magicians at consecration, celebrating sacrifice on the behalf of the laity, bringing down Jesus into the Eucharist; laity become irrelevant, unworthy, and unnecessary; con-science is born–“God in the bosom”, in order to regulate humans in the face of distanced divinity towards the “ideal of the state of perfection” of the religious; education moves out of the monasteries and into the academy; focus moves towards philosophical, literalist language–rule-based religion; Church abuses (simony, sexual immorality, liturgical abuses) prevail

Modern:
personal libraries and personal study grow with the advent of the printing press; Church reformers start the Protestant Reformation; abstract language moves, through nomalism, to particulars, observables: science is born (without the con- of con-scire); Church does damage control of Reformation, resists capitulating to their reforms, fail to provide coherent sacramental theology, though do name the seven sacraments as such for the first time; Church also resists scientific revolution (Galileo, etc.), furthering the gap between science and religion; seminaries established to tackle liturgical abuses; overcompensation: rubrics and canon law become prevailing attitude of the Mass implimentation; Kant proclaims “consciousness” as a seperate entity (another chain in “con-scire”); philosophy begins separating itself; Bishop Ricci convenes Synod of Pistoia, but without the grassroots foundation or prepation by or for the clergy, the Synod, whose reforms are, in most other ways, indistinguishable from Vatican II (though 250 years or so earlier)–Pius VI deems the reforms scandalous and heretical; German scholarship in the academy resurfaces the lost vision of the Church as Christ’s Body; cult of the artist as personal genius arises, towards objective styles of painting, replacing religion in the search for immanent beauty of creation; existentialism accidentally founded by Kierkegaard in order to give human existence value and meaning away from “Christendom” (though he would advocate true Christianity as the highest form of existence); Industrial Revolution begins: humanity’s goals become production, with more time for leisure and self-autonomy; monks in Belgium and Germany begin attempting reconcilliation of sciences, arts, philosophy, and Catholicism: begin turning altars around and experimenting with responsive Masses; Pius X encourages lay participation in singing, by lowering the age of First Communion, and advocating frequent reception of the Sacraments; Predestination thinking in the US Protestants drive mentality that “to succeed is to show that you are one of the chosen”: work ethic of industry entrenched; grassroots scholarship in US and Europe lead to Assisi liturgical conventions, which finally yields to Vatican II; immanent understanding of God reinstated; full and active participation; transcendent abandoned in favor of “pedestrian” language (Pecklers); catechetical structure collape

Continued…

 

[StBrendan]

Continued…

Post-Modernism (now-ish):
trans-continental flight possible;
science fails to answer full-human questioning; all opinions have a counter-argument, so there is no pure knowledge, no pure science (destruction of -science); tension between immanent and transcendent; creation of the World Wide Web (hello!); world shrinks infinitely; consciousness of world grows; young people struggle in spirituality but find mandates in actively helping the poor, loving their gay neighbors as who they are, furthering the cause of societal rights, understanding the world as a network(“Bookend” Generations: encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-161075807.html); literalism, in its pure and aggressive forms, continues to rise; the Internet becomes a neo-tribal connectivity point, replacing religion as the “binding” (the con- without the -science); young people fail to find context of world without religious trainings, though self-help books continue to rise and “universal” treatment of world religions as well; Church fails to engage young with with rich, new (or ancient) symbolic language: Harry Potter becomes the first mainstream post-modern myth, next to other tales like “The Matrix” and “Lord of the Rings” (revived on the big screen) (seriously); Church no longer is sign of one reality (i.e., the Church’s “primacy”), but a symbol amidst the rest of the world religions, though it continues to assert itself as the former, while failing to develop itself as the latter; Columbine-9-11/priest-scandals; youth become neo-stoics in inability to maneuver the world-scale traumas of their youth–apathy or activism, all under guise of lost self-identity; Internet sociability begins to corrode into social posturing (see this week’s TIME magazine back-page essay, “Late Night Shots”, etc); Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart continue to rise as symbols of dis-satisfaction with hierarchical structures (again, seriously and academically stated), though, like all satire, fail to posit any positive attitude of hope–learned helplessness of the young is assuaged with laughter, but without any serious self-examination

So, in summary, what do we expect from 1500 years of Church and world slowly drifting and then re-colliding? We are caught in three different cultures of history. But we can “learn-together” again if we are willing (conscire).

 

[bobzills]

60,000 annulments a year? I’m not saying you are wrong on this as I don’t know myself, but how did you get that info? If that is true, was a sad state we’re in.

That said, in the 1930s, we were just starting to go through a horrible Depression. During desperate times, people learn to stick together and they see what is most important. And on a practical standpoint, it wouldn’t make any sense for a woman to leave her husband if things were bad. They needed to stick together to survive. I’m not saying that this was always the case.

No other Church has experienced the catastrophic decline in support for family life that has been experienced by the Roman Catholic Church in the USA. OK, you don;t like the figure for 1930.Let’s then use the one ofr 1940. In 1940, in the USA, there were 21 marriages annulled for the year. That compares to 63,933 marriages annulled in the year 1991 in the USA. These figures are readily available in many different sources, for example, in the Our Sunday visitor’s Catholic Almanac which comes out each year. Or, for the earlier years, you can use The National Catholic Almanac. Another source is the Statistical yearbook of the Church.
If what you say is true, why is it that only the Roman Catholic Church has exp;erienced this explosion in the number of marriage annulments?

 

[jmcrae]

No other Church has experienced the catastrophic decline in support for family life that has been experienced by the Roman Catholic Church in the USA. OK, you don;t like the figure for 1930.Let’s then use the one ofr 1940. In 1940, in the USA, there were 21 marriages annulled for the year. That compares to 63,933 marriages annulled in the year 1991 in the USA. These figures are readily available in many different sources, for example, in the Our Sunday visitor’s Catholic Almanac which comes out each year. Or, for the earlier years, you can use The National Catholic Almanac. Another source is the Statistical yearbook of the Church.
If what you say is true, why is it that only the Roman Catholic Church has exp;erienced this explosion in the number of marriage annulments?

Because the Protestants are getting “Biblical divorces.” (Protestantism doesn’t have the concept of a Declaration of Nullity.)

I know of one woman (Evangelical) who is on her fifth marriage, after four “Biblical divorces.” I remember a time, and I’m not all that old, really, when people who got married that many times were written up in the tabloids - and they sure as heck didn’t go to Church, or claim to be Christians. Nowadays, it’s considered perfectly normal. There are kids living with their still-married birth parents in the public schools today who feel like aliens from another planet, because they don’t have two (or more) homes to go to, they have no step parents or step siblings, and they don’t wear their house keys on chains around their necks.

 

[scylla]

So most of us agree that throwing out the Baltimore Catechism was wrong… It taught the faith but wasn’t enough because we also needed to share it and internalize it. So instead of improving upon it, it was thrown out…
Instead of improvement on homilies teaching was thrown out and replaced with a reflection.
Instead of improvement on study, it was watered down.
We threw out the statues and art and replaced them with banners and horrible art.

Instead of improving we tried to redo stuff and failed. This is why the Church is so weak these days.

The problem after Vatican II was it’s misimplementation…
Throw out the Church and replace it with feeling, instead of giving feeling to the Church and sharing God’s truth.
Who needs feeling if I can get it anywhere else, that is why people don’t show up. I can get feeling as a Buddhist, Evangelical, New Ager, etc…

Scylla

 

[bobzills]

So most of us agree that throwing out the Baltimore Catechism was wrong… It taught the faith but wasn’t enough because we also needed to share it and internalize it. So instead of improving upon it, it was thrown out…
Instead of improvement on homilies teaching was thrown out and replaced with a reflection.
Instead of improvement on study, it was watered down.
We threw out the statues and art and replaced them with banners and horrible art.

Instead of improving we tried to redo stuff and failed. This is why the Church is so weak these days.

The problem after Vatican II was it’s misimplementation…
Throw out the Church and replace it with feeling, instead of giving feeling to the Church and sharing God’s truth.
Who needs feeling if I can get it anywhere else, that is why people don’t show up. I can get feeling as a Buddhist, Evangelical, New Ager, etc…

Scylla

What you say makes a lot of sense to me. When marriage annulments in the USA go from 9 per year to 63,000 per year, I would say that it indicates that there is a problem somewhere. And by the way, this explosion in marriage annulments came right after Vatican II. Of course, it is not only marriage annulments. There was an article in the recent news about a Catholic Mass in SF:
catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=10624
Perhaps a perception that there is a lessening in the sense of the sacred in Catholic Masses is one contributing factor in declining Church attendance.

 

[jmcrae]

What you say makes a lot of sense to me. When marriage annulments in the USA go from 9 per year to 63,000 per year, I would say that it indicates that there is a problem somewhere. And by the way, this explosion in marriage annulments came right after Vatican II.

Divorce was legalized right around the same time (1967, I think) - that could also be a factor.

 

[bobzills]

Divorce was legalized right around the same time (1967, I think) - that could also be a factor.

Divorce was always legal in the USA. I think you mean that if Catholics got divorced they were not excommunicated from the Church in 1967?
Of course, that rule came after Vatican II also.

 

[chicago]

Divorce was always legal in the USA. I think you mean that if Catholics got divorced they were not excommunicated from the Church in 1967?
Of course, that rule came after Vatican II also.

I think s/he means, “No fault divorce” which made it much more rampant than in the days when you had to “prove a case.”

 

[Al_Masetti]

Divorce was always legal in the USA. I think you mean that if Catholics got divorced they were not excommunicated from the Church in 1967?
Of course, that rule came after Vatican II also.

Just to clarify a point without sticking my nose into a debate: divorce does not result in excommunication. Not now; not ever.

 

[Sarabande]

No other Church has experienced the catastrophic decline in support for family life that has been experienced by the Roman Catholic Church in the USA. OK, you don;t like the figure for 1930.Let’s then use the one ofr 1940. In 1940, in the USA, there were 21 marriages annulled for the year. That compares to 63,933 marriages annulled in the year 1991 in the USA. These figures are readily available in many different sources, for example, in the Our Sunday visitor’s Catholic Almanac which comes out each year. Or, for the earlier years, you can use The National Catholic Almanac. Another source is the Statistical yearbook of the Church.
If what you say is true, why is it that only the Roman Catholic Church has exp;erienced this explosion in the number of marriage annulments?

I wasn’t arguing that what you said wasn’t occurring. I just wanted to know where you got the stats. And if you read on, I did say that the Church probably was more supportive of their flock in the 30s than they are cabable today. But one must also look at the society of the time when looking at the stats.

In previous generations, there was a societal stigma if a couple got divorced and even more so for a woman who, for the most part, had no way of supporting herself if she left her husband for whatever reason. It happened, but not often. Husbands abandoned their wives and children, but most people at various times had a sense of responsibility towards the bed they made. And in a Catholic family that sense also manifested itself with a devout faith and knowledge that marriage was a Sacrament.

Today, divorce sadly doesn’t have the same stigma in society. Many people have pre-nup aggreements in case it “doesn’t work out”. Children of my generation and younger have gone through life living in two houses and are now reluctant or afraid of getting married.

You also asked why the RC Church is the only church which has had an explosion of annulments. Many if not all Protestant churches don’t have annulments and can get divorced and remarried without going through the nullity process. I knew plenty of Protestant friends and family who had divorced parents - more so than practicing Catholic families. SEcondly, what I mentioned in my previous post, people don’t have the blind faith which others had in previous generations. Many factors have been pointed out in my previous posts and the posts of others…

Anyway, I have to get ready for a funeral, so I can’t finish my thought until later.

 

[THurifer2]

The supernatural graces that were gained through reverence have diminished with that reverence. The SPIRIT of VII was the root cause for the lack of reverence. It is the loss of graces that has transformed the whole world…This loss of graces is what caused the plunge of Society…The plunge of Society has been characterized by things like SUnday shopping, Sports on Sunday, Plummeting church atendance (yes the protestants benefitted from Catholic Grace), 60’s revolution, Sex, drugs, crime, etc. …just wait the plunge will go from lack of faith to anti-faith and GOd will be outlawed…Oh wait that has already happened to an extent… Oh perhaps some of those “visionaries” and saints were dead on when they predicted how Christian persecutions will return only be worse.

 

[tcraig]

Whatever the reasons for plummeting Catholic attendance at mass in the U.S., it’s obvious that there’s something in our culture that has at least kept Catholics attending church in some small degree.

When we compare our rates against France - a historically Catholic country with no “competing” protestant sects - we look positively saintly. Most of France has weekly mass attendance in the single digits. It’s the same all over Europe. I believe Italy has the highest rates of church attendance, and they are about even or a little lower than the U.S. rates.

With everything that went wrong, something in the U.S. went at least a little bit right.

 

[stmaria]

With sadness, I agree.

**And priests seem reluctant to address so many controversial issues during their homilies **-- artificial contraception, sex outside of marriage, abortion, homosexuality, embryonic stem cell research, female ordination, end of life issues, voting responsibly, etc. They rarely even speak about the sacrament of Reconciliation, and receiving the Eucharist worthily. How can we Catholic parents be expected to echo down the faith to our children adequately when we’re not taught by our priests? And even when we do try to teach our children, our words aren’t reinforced by the priests, and the validity of what we try to teach is readily questioned by our children (teens and adult children, especially). After all, society teaches them big time to question all authority – to “think for themselves.” We are truly in crisis. I believe the “big scandal” is already happening.

This is not exactly true. ALL of the FSSP priests that say the Traditional Mass have semons on everthing you listed. You will NEVER hear a" feel good "sermon. They ALWAYS instruct the congregation on the faith. These watered down sermons are a direct result of Vatican II.
Besides declining attendance, what has caused the priest shortage? Why do only 30% that attend the OF believe in the Real Presence and only 25 % of Catholics go to Mass on Sundays. The problem is the failure of the priests to instruct the faithful on the teachings of the Church.

 

[THurifer2]

.

With everything that went wrong, something in the U.S. went at least a little bit right.

SO we have fallen Less than Europe and that is viewed as right?

How about we are a Lesser failure?

Perhaps we could just speculate that a Lower percentage of American Catholics are going to end up in Hell than Europeans?

 

[otjm]

My guess is that the reader is correct and that this is one more example of the fact that Vatican II was a disaster for the Catholic Church in many ways. Take for another example, the support of family life since Vatican II. In the USA in 1930, there were about 9 marriage annulments total. But today it is running up to 60,000 and more in recent years. When you go from 9 marriage anulments per year in the USA to more than 60,000 marriage annulments per year in the USA, it is difficult to see how the Church has been supporting family life as much as it did in 1930.

and that issue about annulments has been thoroughly vetted elsewhere.

Vatican 2 was not a disaster for the Church; life was. Anyone who supposes that Vatican 2 caused the chaos in the Church is not looking at the source of the issues and is playing a post hoc, ergo propter hoc analysis. The Church did not reside in a vacuum during or after Vatican 2 any more than it did at any other time in history.

 

[otjm]

Divorce was always legal in the USA. I think you mean that if Catholics got divorced they were not excommunicated from the Church in 1967?
Of course, that rule came after Vatican II also.

No it didn’t.

There was no rule that a divorce caused excommunication.

What changed is that the Church realized that it had a significant problem in that it did not address marriages that were not sacramental marriages because Canon law did not adequately address the issues. Canon law changed because it was not addressing the issues properly.

The Church has a duty to regulate the sacraments and has the authority to determine whether or not a sacrament has occured. What it found was that it had a lot of people who had gone through a ceremony, but had not confected the sacrament of marriage for various reasons, and Canon law was not addressing those reasons. So the law changed to allow the Church to address the issues.

And as to divorce being legal, the most significant factor in the increase in divorces was no fault changes in the laws of the States.

Further discussion should be taken up in a separate thread.

 

[otjm]

These watered down sermons are a direct result of Vatican II.

Having grown up prior to Vatican 2, I can tell you that there were lousy sermons before it too. Homiletics is one of the poorer aspects a priestly training, not that the professors don’t try.

Watered down homilies are a result of failure on the part of the priest to do what Vatican 2 required - break open the Scripture. If a priest understands Scripture and is willing to be something other than politically correct, he will give a good homily, because Scripture is a significant part of the base of our beliefs - the other being Tradition, which can be brought in as part of the homily. Nothing in Vatican 2 had to do with being politically correct. That is a societal imposed “norm”.

I have heard some fantastic homilies - insightful, related to Scripture, on point of the issues being dicussed (see previous posts).

And prior to Vatican 2 I heard sermons, not related to the Scripture, not backed with Scripture, and leaving one with the impression that “It is wrong becauase I said so”. Vatican 2 wanted to change that, not by watering down anything, but by adding to it - “This is wrong and this is why”. If it didn’t work, blaming Vatican 2 for the failure is most definitely putting the blame on the wrong issue.