Newly released statistics show the decline of the Catholic Church in England and Wales in 1960s and 1970s

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IanM

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“Research by the Latin Mass Society has demonstrated the striking decline of a range of statistical indications of the health of the Catholic Church in England and Wales in the 1960s and 1970s. To our knowledge this data has never been made available in collated form before: the number of ordinations year by year since 1860, the number of priests since 1890, and baptisms, marriages, and receptions, and estimates of the Catholic population, since 1913.”

https://lms.org.uk/statistics
 
Easily debunked by the fact that non-Catholic churches experienced a similar decline despite not being affected By Vatican II, and the fact that this global trend was well underway before Vatican II was even opened, Quebec in the 1950s being a prime example.

And by the fact that those who left had been catechized and inculturated in a “TLM” environment.

The roots of the decline of religion in the West go back long before the 1960s.

Thinking that a return to the pre-VII state of the Church (or, rather, a fanciful “Golden Age”) is going to magically draw in the crowds is plain delusional. There are plenty of good reasons why so few tears were shed when the the Latin Mass was abandoned.

The problem is much bigger than Catholicism, and any solution would have to be, too.
 
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I agree with you on many points here. However, I would say that V2 was not “the reason”, but that it definitely did further the damage.
The ideas of modernism were creeping into cultures around the world for decades prior to V2 and the Catholic Church was not immune to these ideologies.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, when the world needed strong tradition and hard lines from the faith to combat cultural challenges, she got compromise and allowances that led to further change and the degradation of the church and it’s impact on the world.
 
IanM said:
demonstrated the striking decline
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Jbrady said:
Easily debunked by the fact that non-Catholic churches experienced a similar decline
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The Latin Mass was around during the French Revolution, during WWI , the apparitions of Fatima, WWII. After Vatican II all those priests and nuns who left their vocations were the same priests and nuns who were in the Church before Vatican II.

The dawn of television in the 1950s, the influence of Rock n Roll, Hollywood and the proliferation of sex through movies, the corruption of youth through pornography, the evil use of technology with such things as the pill, and the mass media are just some of the things which took aim at the family, which transformed culture and ushered generations into the pursuit of sex, consumerism, materialism, fame, and fortune, and sports and entertainment became the false idols of the late 20th century. It was Sister Lucia the Fatima seer who said that the final battle of evil would be against the family. What we see today are the rotten fruits of bad seeds sown generations ago.

 
Conclusions based on Correlations are always shaky:
  • Obviously the West was secularized as a whole during that period
  • The Church leaders who implemented changes for 2 decades after V2, sometimes with mistakes, were trained, formed, promoted in the pre V2 Church. So were the laity who, arguably failed to rise up to the challenge.
  • That said, the TLM people have a point about the restoration of the TLM. There is a small group within the Church that is now energized. This restoration has encouraged some solid communities of laity, new vocations and orders, gathered around the TLM.
This shows that this sub group definitely benefitted from the option of the EF, and benefitted the Church as a whole. It doesn’t prove the whole Church would have benefitted if there never was an OF, or V2.
 
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commenter said:
This shows that this sub group definitely benefitted from the option of the EF, and benefitted the Church as a whole. It doesn’t prove the whole Church would have benefitted if there never was an OF, or V2.
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In fact, it proves that the Church has benefitted from V2, and the OF, that allows options, including the EF. Before the Council, the idea of two different forms of the Roman Rite would have been dismissed quickly, and suppressed thoroughly. It is only the liberalization from Vatican II that allows a sub-group to flourish in this fashion.
 
I would disagree with you here. I believe that the Latin mass flourishing has nothing to do with the diversity or liberalization within the church.
I don’t think you can point to the changes made in V2 as the reason the Age old Latin mass is flourishing.
 
ConcernedConvert said:
I would disagree with you here. I believe that the Latin mass flourishing has nothing to do with the diversity or liberalization within the church.
I don’t think you can point to the changes made in V2 as the reason the Age old Latin mass is flourishing.
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How much liturgical diversity do you think there was before Vatican II? My memory is that people cherished the idea that the Mass was the same wherever you went in the world. What little diversity they had was constantly challenged by a desire for uniformity, as by the Latinization of the Eastern Rites.

If that had not changed, the EF would not be allowed today. If it were not allowed, it would not flourish. Maybe you are thinking of other factors that enable the flourishing, but those would not have any effect if the EF was forbidden. And it would have been forbidden if the Council had not changed things.
 
I guess I am confused how you can attribute v2(which “banned” the Latin mass) with being the sole reason it is flourishing today.
 
Agreed completely. And not only is it to unify the prayers of those around the world, but it is to also unify us with the church triumphant during certain parts of the mass.
 
I think the evidence for this is very apparent today where, in many cases, one can go to two or three different NO parishes all within a hundred miles of each other, and witness completely different masses.
 
ConcernedConvert said:
Unfortunately, in my opinion, when the world needed strong tradition and hard lines from the faith to combat cultural challenges, she got compromise and allowances that led to further change and the degradation of the church and it’s impact on the world.
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Jbrady alluded to the situation in Québec. What you suggest above, is the primary reason the faithful left the Church in Québec, a trend that started just a year or two before Vatican II. In Québec it went farther, it was highly clericalist and Jansenist to boot. It nearly killed off the Church in Québec, and to bring what you suggest back, would, IMHO, finish it off. I myself would likely leave it if that happened.

Hint: the local Church literally denied the sacraments to married women who weren’t either pregnant, nursing, or attempting to get pregnant. Many women were coerced into having 10+ kids, some as high as 20 if they started young enough and were strong enough. A recipe for keeping Catholic Quebecers in perpetual poverty, which is exactly what happened.

No thanks. That’s not religion, it’s cruelty.
 
ConcernedConvert said:
I guess I am confused how you can attribute v2(which “banned” the Latin mass) with being the sole reason it is flourishing today.
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I don’ see how it is confusing at all. First of all VII never banned the previous Mass, it simply allowed for reform (the actual OF came years after the Council ended). And the end result was 2 different forms of the Latin rite Mass, which was the real innovation.
 
And it also was not authentic Catholic teaching.

As you note, the French ‘Jansenist’ strain has existed for centuries, but that is as much a cultural attempt to use the Faith for mostly political aims as any other ‘ism’. Modernism today (and again for more than a century) is particularly a problem in the US Church, but it doesn’t mean that the Catholic faith itself is the problem.

And then there’s Ireland, and we know what happened there.

Seriously, every problem that started with St. Paul noting people listening to “a different gospel’ even in HIS time, comes about when people stray from the Church into “THEIR” Church or “THEIR God” or “THEIR culture’ or whatever. We get problems because some people think that “The German Church’ needs changes, the Amazon Church needs changes, the post COVID church needs changes, etc. Etc.

It does seem that in places where people actually obey the Church—not necessarily only in places where the TLM is used, as there are plenty of reverent OF parishes which also maintain unalloyed traditions and practices—there are the ‘remnants’ who walk ‘neither to right nor left’. . .neither to loosey-goosey modernism nor to rigid Jansenism.

Myself, I would be inclined to listen more to Cardinal Sarah. Here is a man who came from a culture where Christianity had been unknown, was converted with the TLM and is comfortable with the OF, knows what it is like to both keep the good of the culture of the people AND to embrace the timelessness of Christianity, and whose example is bringing MORE to the faith.
 
OraLabora said:
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ConcernedConvert:
Unfortunately, in my opinion, when the world needed strong tradition and hard lines from the faith to combat cultural challenges, she got compromise and allowances that led to further change and the degradation of the church and it’s impact on the world.
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Jbrady alluded to the situation in Québec. What you suggest above, is the primary reason the faithful left the Church in Québec, a trend that started just a year or two before Vatican II. In Québec it went farther, it was highly clericalist and Jansenist to boot. It nearly killed off the Church in Québec, and to bring what you suggest back, would, IMHO, finish it off. I myself would likely leave it if that happened.

Hint: the local Church literally denied the sacraments to married women who weren’t either pregnant, nursing, or attempting to get pregnant. Many women were coerced into having 10+ kids, some as high as 20 if they started young enough and were strong enough. A recipe for keeping Catholic Quebecers in perpetual poverty, which is exactly what happened.

No thanks. That’s not religion, it’s cruelty.
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Whoa. Why did Catholics start leaving in 1962 then? They put up with that for how long, and then in 1962 decided to leave?
EDIT - - I see. The “Quiet Revolution”
Was this an official teaching? I get the sense that you are exaggerating this. Do you have any documentation of this?
 
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Here’s an interesting article:

A tidbit:
"Of special interest to those living in our current sex-obsessed culture are the Church’s past efforts to encourage couples to be fruitful and multiply. In short to have children - and lots of them! Judging from the number of times I have heard Quebeckers complain about this, it clearly was a very galling issue for those alive at the time. For time and again people have regaled me with stories about how some bossy priest had pressured their grandparents and great grandparents to bring lots of children into the world.

Looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to know how true these stories are and how embroidered they might have become with the passage of time. But what clearly is real is the passion people inject into this story’s telling and its prominent place in Quebec’s national mythology. Indeed, I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has told me the story about how some parish priest visited their grandparents and strong-armed them into having 16 children or some similarly high body count.

But is it true? Or is it just one more secularist fairy tale to scare small children?"

 
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