One would have to close one’s eyes not to see that the Catholic Church is suffering a grave crisis. In the 1960’s, at the time of the Second Vatican Council, there were hopes for a new springtime in the Church; exactly the opposite has come to pass. Thousands of priests have abandoned their office, and thousands of monks and religious have returned to secular life. There are very few vocations in Europe and not many in North America either; countless seminaries, convents, and religious houses have closed their doors. Many parishes lack priests, and religious congregations are obliged to abandon schools, hospitals, and homes for the aged. As Pope Paul VI lamented on June 29, 1972, “Through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”According to an article by Fabrizio de Santis in the Corriere della Sera of September 25, 1971, somewhere between 7,000 to 8,000 priests had abandoned the priesthood in Italy alone over the previous eight years. In the Church as a whole 21,320 priests were reduced to lay status between 1962 and 1972. Not included in this number are those who didn’t bother to seek official reduction to lay status.From 1967 to 1974, 30,000 to 40,000 priests abandoned their vocation. These catastrophic events can be compared with the effects of the so-called Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Some comments by Cardinal Ratzinger illustrate what has happened by a single example. In the early 1960’s, Quebec was the region that counted, proportionally speaking, the most nuns in the world. “Between 1961 and 1981, because of departures, deaths, and the end of new vocations, the number of nuns fell from 46,933 to 26,294, a decline of 44 percent, and there is still no end in sight. During the same period new vocations fell by at least 98.5 percent. A large part of the remaining 1.5 percent is composed, not of young women, but of late vocations. As a result, sociologists agree on a grim but objective conclusion: “Soon (unless there is a reversal of the trend, which is wholly improbable, at least viewed humanly) women’s religious life as we have known it will be only a memory in Canada.” In America in 1960, there were 1,527 men ordained to the priesthood. In 1998, only 460 were ordained–a decline of over 1,000 per year. In France in the 1950’s there were about 1,000 priestly ordinations per year. In the 1990’s there were no more than 100 per year; the number of entries into seminaries continues to decrease. In Germany, 1996 represented a new record low of candidates for the priesthood: German seminaries and religious orders had only 232 entries; as recently as 1986 there were 727 entries. The number of religious in the world continues to decline. Does this crisis also affect the faithful? In the 1950’s, Mass attendance in America was often higher than 70 percent among Catholics; some studies show that in 2000, this number had fallen to under 30 percent. In 1958, 35 percent of the French attended Mass every Sunday; today fewer than 5 percent do so, and these are often old people. In 1950 more than 90 percent of the French were baptized as children; today fewer than 60 percent are.
