Guess what? People were leaving before Vatican II. Why do we think they held the council? Society in general, after WWII, became increasingly irreligious. Rolling the clock back only restores the known problems in the “old rite.”
Wait a minute — Vatican II was convened because people were leaving the Church? I never heard
that before. The way I always heard it, John XXIII just kind of “woke up one morning and decided the Church needed a council”.
It might shock some people to hear me say this, but I have to think that the Church
did need a council at this particular time. In the 20th century, the world had been through two of the worst wars, in quick succession, that had ever occurred. European civilization, or large portions of it, was left in ruins both physically and morally. There was also communism, which V2 did not address, this due to an agreement between Rome and Moscow. That was very unfortunate, but it was just the fact of the matter.
As for what would have happened if there never had been a
Novus Ordo Missae — if the Church had retained the Traditional Latin Mass and
only the TLM — that is hard to say. Catholics were emerging from their often insular, even ghettoized lives, they were pursuing higher education along with everybody else, and there was an absolute social and cultural revolution in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. There might have been a “quiet revolution” (such as happened in Quebec) and many people would have just quit going to Mass. You had television, and improved communication and transportation, and Catholics saw the non-Catholic world and were attracted to it. I don’t know how it would have gone, for that one hour on Sundays to have been a mystic, contemplative, otherworldly experience that contrasted so dramatically with people’s everyday lives. Again, hard to say. We’ll never know.
I
do know that the TLM in our day is very self-selecting — everybody who is there, is there because they
want to be there, they have made a conscious choice to be at the TLM and not the OF, and not only are they fully orthodox in the Faith (some do not even use NFP, viewing this as only permissible for the gravest of reasons which they don’t see as applying to them), but very often, other aspects of their lifestyle are conservative, traditional, “retro”, and so on. Their politics are usually
very right-wing. In short, they are a small sliver of the Catholic world and not at all representative of the larger Church. (But do they
ever produce vocations! If the Church at large followed suit, we wouldn’t have a priest shortage.)
