Statistics on Latin Mass?

[Elizabeth502]

Rather, the overwhelming majority of the drop in Mass attendance in both the UK and the USA was immediately surrounding that of Vatican II and the implementation of the Mass of Paul VI.

And it could have been coincidence.
Could have been caused by outside factors, etc.

But one thing is for sure: The vernacular Mass was not the great gathering, renewing factor that many people assume, nor would offering it less often result in vastly reduced attendance. We have had the vernacular Mass as the dominant, almost exclusive Mass for near 50 years now, yet Catholic Mass attendance (forget about other aspects of practice, and fidelity to the Magisterium – simply Mass attendance) has declined over the period, and the average non-traditional parish has not experienced a resurgence of attendance, lay enthusiasm, or priestly vocations.

Whatever was intended by the vernacular Mass was neither accomplished by itself, nor has it overriden whatever other reasons for attrition have been operative.

 

[petronus]

I kind of boggles my mind to see Bishops who are so negative against people who desire a reverent and sacred form of worship and who are acting in line with the Church and its history.

Bishops are not being negative in the way you say .

Bishops are being positive . The much needed reform of the Liturgy called for by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council is in line with the Church and its history .

The vast majority of Catholics have welcomed the reforms . They like the more reverent and sacred form of worship brought about by the reforms . They want the reformed Liturgy celebrated in the vernacular , rather than the Tridentine Mass .

In my younger days , prior to the reformed liturgy , I had attended thousands of Tridentine Masses , many of them as an altar server . Most of them were far from reverent and sacred . In fact they were quite disgraceful , verging on the sacriligeous .

I am thankful for the reformed liturgy which is here to stay , and am grateful that it is only a very tiny , tiny , tiny majority of Catholics who want a Tridentine Mass . They can have it if they want , but they will never foist it on me .

 

[Kevin12]

I don’t really identify as a “traditionalist” (having, as I said, no really strong attachment to the EF anyway), but at any rate I’m not attacking the NO in principle or the NO as it is celebrated today. The NO as it is celebrated today (your experience of it, and mine) is not the NO as it was celebrated in many places in the 1970s, when (I argue) the relevant statistics started to sour.

I didn’t actually discover the EF until about 3-4 months after deciding to convert and even then it was only because I read about it in a history of the Council, not because anyone actually told me about it. I first checked it out mostly out of morbid curiosity and didn’t attend another one for close to a year. So obviously, the NO in my area was not an immediate impediment to my converting (it has its own abuses though of the sort everyone just tolerates because that’s how things are done). If, on the other hand, I were a much younger man, I might’ve found it much more difficult to come into, or stay in, the Church in the height of the liturgical crazy period of the 1970s.

If I had lived in that time, I don’t know what I would’ve done. I don’t think I would’ve apostasized or gone sedevacantist or anything of the sort (anyone who refuses to enter or stay in a church because they dislike its liturgy has deeper problems than the liturgy), but I might’ve gone SSPX if only to keep from going mad, or to keep my heart from breaking.** It’s easy for us, from the comfortable spot where we’re sitting today, to look back at the Lefebvrites with scorn and wonder what they were thinking. Much harder for us to try to actually imagine it.**

What kind of abuses? I know that things like shaking the hand of a non-family member after the consecration is not what is written in the rubric, but even if it isn’t what your technically supposed to use - that word “abuse”, you have no idea how strong that word is. Even if it is technically correct, the immediate connotation is of the paedophilia scandal - it makes it seem like traditionalists equate shaking a non-relatives hand with one of the worst sorts of crimes possible. Abuse implies intention to harm or dishonor and I have never seen that in a Mass. Perhaps I am just a Protestant at heart in spite of being born and raised Catholic, but I just cannot for the life of me imagine that Christ, who pointed out more than once that fixation on rituals and laws can be a stumbling block to faith, would have cared about half of the things traditionalists feel are the end-all and be-all of Christianity.

The Lefebvrites split in 1988, which is well after the time you’re talking about. Furthermore, if their only issue was with the liturgy, I doubt that the issues that would have come up did. The Lefebvrites are little more than neo-Jansensists, and the Church shouldn’t have to put down a schism twice.

 

[Kevin12]

If it was a steady rate of decline over the 40 years, you might have a point, but it wasn’t.

As was shown in Figure 1 of that study, which was published in the reputable Homiletic and Pastoral Review, the decline was not a consistent 1% per year. Rather, the overwhelming majority of the drop in Mass attendance in both the UK and the USA was immediately surrounding that of Vatican II and the implementation of the Mass of Paul VI. The graph for the USA actually shows a 22% drop in Mass attendance from approx. 1965 to approx. 1977. The trend line for the UK shows 25% over the same time span. After that, Mass attendance in the USA actually steadied to the point that it only dropped approx. 4% over the next 15 years. In the UK, it continued to drop, but not even close to the same rate of the initial trend, taking from 1977 to 1999 to drop an additional 15%.

In addition, the myth that Catholics and Protestants saw roughly the same decline in attendance, and thus, it has nothing to do with Vatican II or the form of the Mass is dispelled in Figure 3. In the same time span that Mass attendance dropped 22% in the USA, attendance at Protestant services only dropped 5%, which was recovered in the late 1980’s. Over the entire span of the data collection, while USA Mass attendance dropped 30%, attendance at Protestant services actually stayed the same, at 45%.

So then, the argument is that there was a great bloc of Catholics deeply opposed to the OF right from the beginning, and when they couldn’t get their way they simply stopped attending Mass? I’ve got to tell you that I have met many former Catholics from the pre-Vatican II era who left the Church, and in every case in was because they thought the Church was too conservative. For example, mainline Protestantism embraced contraception, but Catholicism did not. Furthermore, this article does not break down this by denomination - if you take away Evangelicals, who experienced a boom at that time, you can see the same major declines in Church attendance among Protestants significantly declines during this same period, losing one fifth to one third of their members..

I think this debate is pointless though, I don’t think anyone is going to change their mind.

 

[Lucky7]

As has been said, no one thing is definitely the culprit and that sort of reductionism is just bad social science. There’s a whole host of problems that all converged on the same historical moment and brought us (“us” being the whole of Western civilization) to the present state of degeneracy. I don’t see why it’s hard to believe that the rapid, uncoordinated implementation of a new order of Mass and functional suppression of the previous one, which had been in uninterrupted use for 400 years, was one factor among many, at least the one most immediately relevant to Catholics.

I would also argue that if the New Mass was merely a vernacular change that the reaction would have been different. I think a big reason why many Catholics had an issue with the New Mass at that time is that it involved *so many *changes. There are many who hate the EF and don’t want it “foisted” upon them. Imagine having gone to the NO mass your whole life (as well as your parents and grandparents) and then all of a sudden the Church changed all masses to be EF. I can certainly understand how that was jarring to those who experienced the opposite. The two forms of mass look (not just sound) so different from one another. I mean we have folks whining about the small changes to the words we say at mass.

Was the change after Trent that different too?

 

[Cat]

It was right after Vatican II that the Evangelical Protestant churches started vamping up their outreach. I was there. It was amazing. In the Evangelical Protestant version of history, this time is considered a “mini-awakening”. An “awakening” is a spiritual revival sent by the Holy Spirit that causes people to convert. The Great Awakening is a fairly well-documented period of American History, where literally thousands of people converted to Christianity.

So for Evangelical Protestants to call that time a “mini-awakening” means that they were experiencing humongous growth. And I can remember that time. We were bringing in rock bands, getting rid of any vestige of a liturgy, and training pastors to be excellent public speakers.

This was the time when the Rev. Billy Graham was coming into his stride, and thousands would pack stadiums to hear him speak,and millions would watch the broadcasts of his crusades on television and convert by telephone.

This was the time when Dr. Bill Bright took Campus Crusade for Christ from a small college outreach to an international evangelical movement, developing the 4 Spiritual Laws and other simple written materials that even children could understand and use.

And this was the glorious time when church music expanded to include popular forms like rock and pop! Jesus Rock music developed, and musicians like Randy Stonehill and Larry Norman packed their coffeehouse venues out west, and here in the Midwest, we bought their albums (vinyl!) and loved it! Churches start bringing the new Christian bands in, and this started up the “Music Wars,” which I believe have finally ended in the Evangelical Protestant churches, but have been passed to the Catholic Churches.

Also, organizations like Child Evangelism Fellowship fine-tuned their materials and started thousands of Back Yard Clubs for children–fun, low-commitment clubs that met in homes and taught thousands of children Bible stories.

I could go on and on–my point is that at the same time Vatican II happened to the Catholics, the Evangelical Protestants were revving everything up, and I think that a lot of Catholics visited these Evangelical churches or one of their ancillary outreaches out of curiousity and ended up sticking around. I knew dozens and dozens of Catholic families who came to our Conference Baptist church and joined. These people were NOT looking for traditional Catholicism :nope:–they were looking for something new and more meaningful to their everyday lives!

These lively and friendly Evangelical outreaches with their rock music and excellent speakers and emphasis on personal holiness and commitment to Christ must have seemed really amazing and wonderful to Catholics who had spent their entire lives listening to a foreign language and quiet classical music sung by a few people, and who had not spent a lot of time reading the Bible.

I agree with many people on this thread who say that it wasn’t the changes that discombobulated Catholics–it was the haphazard way that they were introduced and implemented. I was too young to realize this, but I’m guessing that the Evangelical Protestants learned from the mistakes the Catholics made, and did a lot of closed-doors advance planning before bursting into the public arena with their “new” music, speakers, childrens’ clubs, teen encounters, retreats, books, movies, etc. Lot of strategy–perhaps it would have possibly made a big difference for the aftermath of Vatican II. It sounds to me that while Evangelicals were smooth and slick, the Catholics were rather clumsy and confused.

 

[YoungTradCath]

So then, the argument is that there was a great bloc of Catholics deeply opposed to the OF right from the beginning, and when they couldn’t get their way they simply stopped attending Mass? I’ve got to tell you that I have met many former Catholics from the pre-Vatican II era who left the Church, and in every case in was because they thought the Church was too conservative. For example, mainline Protestantism embraced contraception, but Catholicism did not.

I think this is a bit simplistic. To understand this well I think we have to understand the image that Catholics had of the Church before Vatican II and during it. To them, the Church was basically seen as a monolithic structure that did not, and essentially could not, change. So when it did, at least outwardly, my hunch is that–at least for one cohort of people who left, I am not trying to reduce this to one thing–that the radical changes to the outward structures of the Church disconfirmed for them the validity of the inner structures (doctrines, dogmas, morals) of the Church. So, “Since Mass can change, why can’t I go down to St Mark’s Episcopal and contracept away? The Catholic Church is mean. It doesn’t matter, obviously, where I go to church, if St. Jo’s Catholic Church can rip out its high altar and paint everything beige and Fr. can preach endlessly about war rallies and Vatican II and ‘lay empowerment.’” This is a caricature of logic, but I believe it is essentially the sort of thinking that many used to justify their attrition. “If X can change, why can’t Y?”

Additionally, yes, I do believe there was a cohort of Catholics who was opposed to the OF from the beginning, although smaller than the above cohort. However, I’m not sure that it would have been good for them to go to St. Mark’s Episcopal, since they were rapidly losing liturgical majesty–in an outward sense, perhaps not an inner by the book sense–at about the same rate. No, I think most of these Catholics suffered their cancer-like pains in silence until 1984, 1988, or perhaps even 2007 or later. Or they went to Eastern parishes. Or they became Orthodox. Or they just stopped going to church all together.

Furthermore, I think there are other internal logics that I will not go through here.

Not all people are the same. Not all Catholics are the same. Not all Catholics’ experience of the Church was or is the same. However, we can point out generalities and we can point out glaring logical leaps that don’t take 800 intermediate steps to get a result, and we can do those things without putting too much credibility on the line.

 

[YoungTradCath]

I agree with many people on this thread who say that it wasn’t the changes that discombobulated Catholics–it was the haphazard way that they were introduced and implemented. I was too young to realize this, but I’m guessing that the Evangelical Protestants learned from the mistakes the Catholics made, and did a lot of closed-doors advance planning before bursting into the public arena with their “new” music, speakers, childrens’ clubs, teen encounters, retreats, books, movies, etc. Lot of strategy–perhaps it would have possibly made a big difference for the aftermath of Vatican II. It sounds to me that while Evangelicals were smooth and slick, the Catholics were rather clumsy and confused.

Then why are Evangelicals losing steam in this country regardless? If it’s so great, why’s it failing? Perhaps not as fast as XYZ Mainline, but they’re having problems of their own. Clearly, they have both a substance and a delivery problem. More strobe lights and fun music and fellowship classes–and yes often that is what Evangelicalism basically comes down to, I have years of experience–does not a better Evangelical community make. For all their coordinated effort, it’s nevertheless not enough. Just like our uncoordinated effort.

 

[sw85]

In 1965, Mass attendance was 65%. In 2012 it was 25%, which is a loss of 40% over 48 years, which would be less than 1% per year; if you want to take current attendance at 20% (and the figures vary) that would be 45% loss in 48 years, still less than 1% per year.

Don’t look at forty-year slopes, they’re always going to be unimpressive because they’re averages. Look at year-by-year slopes, specifically in the decade before and after 1970. That is, when does the year-over-year change stop being impressive?

Full disclosure, I’m a statistician by trade.

What kind of abuses? I know that things like shaking the hand of a non-family member after the consecration is not what is written in the rubric, but even if it isn’t what your technically supposed to use - that word “abuse”, you have no idea how strong that word is. Even if it is technically correct, the immediate connotation is of the paedophilia scandal - it makes it seem like traditionalists equate shaking a non-relatives hand with one of the worst sorts of crimes possible. Abuse implies intention to harm or dishonor and I have never seen that in a Mass.

A liturgical abuse is just that: an abuse (ab-use, “apart from the [proper] use”) of the liturgy. It is any action which is not permitted in the context of the liturgy, such as interrupting the introductory rites to tell jokes, etc. Yes, they are relatively minor, as I said, compared to some of the stuff Catholics have had to deal with in the past.

Perhaps I am just a Protestant at heart in spite of being born and raised Catholic, but I just cannot for the life of me imagine that Christ, who pointed out more than once that fixation on rituals and laws can be a stumbling block to faith, would have cared about half of the things traditionalists feel are the end-all and be-all of Christianity.

I’d encourage you to reread the Old Testament, especially Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Jesus (who is Yahweh, in the direct personal sense, not the loose Trinitarian sense) was known to occasionally strike Levitical priests dead for dishonoring him by abusing the rite of worship. If I recall right, Levitical priests offered the sacrifice behind a screen with a rope tied around their foot so that they could be dragged out if they died, and had bells sewn to the hem of their garments so that they could be heard moving around and thus be known to be still alive.

Obviously, as far as we know, God doesn’t kill priests for liturgical abuse anymore (also perhaps because the liturgy we have today was not instituted by God directly). But it’s worth remembering that God is “the same, yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” and that he is badly dishonored when we conduct the liturgy poorly, flippy, and irreverently. This is the reason the Missal in ages past used to include an exhortation that it was a grave sin to intentionally alter so much as a single word or gesture contained therein.

The Lefebvrites split in 1988, which is well after the time you’re talking about. Furthermore, if their only issue was with the liturgy, I doubt that the issues that would have come up did. The Lefebvrites are little more than neo-Jansensists, and the Church shouldn’t have to put down a schism twice.

Lefebvre’s decision to illicitly consecrate bishops didn’t happen in a vacuum.

 

[sw85]

So then, the argument is that there was a great bloc of Catholics deeply opposed to the OF right from the beginning, and when they couldn’t get their way they simply stopped attending Mass?

No, or at least, that’s not my argument. I said elsewhere that the EF was generally seen as having serious structural problems of its own and so was badly in need of reform that probably would’ve happened even in a hypothetical world without Vatican II. We’ve all heard stories of EF abuses prior to VII, after all, such as the 10-minute Low Mass or the improper distribution of communion. (Surprise surprise, many of those who abused the EF went to abuse the OF.)

Now imagine you what there alive in 1970. You have heard the sustained narrative from the media and more unscrupulous members of the clergy for the last 5 years that Vatican II has modernized the Church and jettisoned its most controversial teachings on extra ecclesiam nulla salus, indifferentism, the primacy of the Pope, etc. etc. etc. Suddenly the stuffy and formal EF is done away with, the Mass you’ve known your whole life. Suddenly the Mass doesn’t seem so different from the Episcopalian service down the street. The elaborate, beautiful high altar at your parish is destroyed with sledge hammers and replaced with a simple table altar. The confessional booths are smashed. The tabernacle is removed from the sanctuary. Gregorian chant gives way to guitars and tambourines. Latin is gone and the priest is turned around to face you, as if he were giving a lecture. Etc. etc. etc.

(Of course neither Vatican II nor the OF endorsed these things. They are products of lies about VII on the one hand and too careless and unsupervised an implementation of the OF on the other. But how would the average person in the pews know this, in 1970, without access to the Internet, whose sole knowledge of Vatican II has come mainly from the media?)

The modern tendency is to say that the social surface doesn’t matter, all that matters is what’s really going on underneath. This gets it absolutely wrong. It’s like saying the surface of the earth doesn’t matter, what matters is the core of the earth. We live on the surface. How reality is perceived and experienced is at least as important a fact as what that reality actually, objectively is.

For such a hypothetical person, the social surface of the time conduces to the belief that the Church has acknowledged the fundamental correctness of Protestantism. What he sees, after all, is a series of changes that almost perfectly address Protestant objections to the Mass, downplaying the ontological superiority of the ordained priesthood (by turning him around, dressing him in less elaborate vestments, reducing his language to the ordinary and commonplace, etc.), and so on.

Except he can’t use contraception cause the Pope said so. Booo. Well, if Protestants are so right, why not go join them? If even the Church won’t buy what it’s selling, why should he? They’ve been doing Protestantism longer and they’ve gotten better at it, after all. And they’ll let him gratify his lusts with the approval of his conscience.

In other words, the problem isn’t the OF, or opposition to the OF; the problem is how the OF was implemented, and how this implementation was experienced by the laity. Radical changes to the Church at its most visible point of contact with the laity gave a particular impression of the Church that wasn’t true.

I would also argue that if the New Mass was merely a vernacular change that the reaction would have been different. I think a big reason why many Catholics had an issue with the New Mass at that time is that it involved *so many *changes. There are many who hate the EF and don’t want it “foisted” upon them. Imagine having gone to the NO mass your whole life (as well as your parents and grandparents) and then all of a sudden the Church changed all masses to be EF. I can certainly understand how that was jarring to those who experienced the opposite. The two forms of mass look (not just sound) so different from one another. I mean we have folks whining about the small changes to the words we say at mass.

Was the change after Trent that different too?

Yes, the changes in the rubrics were probably even more profound than the change in language, and very relevant. Compare, for instance, the number of bows and genuflections in the EF’s Roman canon to the number in the OF’s Liturgy of the Eucharist. There’s another social surface thing that would have mattered to people at the time: What impression would dramatically reducing the number of bows and genuflections before the Blessed Sacrament give re: the centrality of the Eucharist?

I’ve said elsewhere I don’t have an overly strong attachment to the EF, and while I currently prefer it to the OF, I’d be just as happy to attend the OF the way Sacrosanctum Concilium envisioned it, where Gregorian chant can actually be heard, Latin retains the place of highest honor, and the organ remains the normative musical instrument. I certainly don’t think a large-scale overnight suppression of the OF is a good idea. It was a bad idea when we did it to the EF, so it’d be a bad idea to do it to the OF. The badness of the idea has nothing to do with the form of the Mass (which is my point) but with foisting changes on people suddenly and with minimal catechesis or coordination, especially with respect to something as fundamental as the liturgy.

 

[ProVobis]

I would also argue that if the New Mass was merely a vernacular change that the reaction would have been different. I think a big reason why many Catholics had an issue with the New Mass at that time is that it involved *so many *changes.

For the record, statistics usually show that in the U.S. the decline in Mass attendance started in 1964. That was about the time it was becoming obvious that religious vocations were dropping and Catholic schools were closing as well. This was 6 years prior to the New Mass, but it was becoming apparent that the liturgy would be changing into the vernacular as well. In fact our high school religion teacher (in 63) was telling everyone to hold off buying any new handmissals for themselves.

And again, Latin was NOT the problem in 1962 (when 70% of Catholics still attended Mass weekly.)

It sure seems to be now though.

 

[Lucky7]

A liturgical abuse is just that: an abuse (ab-use, “apart from the [proper] use”) of the liturgy. It is any action which is not permitted in the context of the liturgy

And if I’m not mistaken, didn’t JPII and/or Benedict XVI call them such?

 

[Megan7]

God bless you too, dear Megan!

Dear Lormar,

Thank you for this kind post:thumbsup:

God bless you,

Pax

Megan

 

[Cat]

Then why are Evangelicals losing steam in this country regardless? If it’s so great, why’s it failing? Perhaps not as fast as XYZ Mainline, but they’re having problems of their own. Clearly, they have both a substance and a delivery problem. More strobe lights and fun music and fellowship classes–and yes often that is what Evangelicalism basically comes down to, I have years of experience–does not a better Evangelical community make. For all their coordinated effort, it’s nevertheless not enough. Just like our uncoordinated effort.

Are the Evangelicals losing steam? I have seen plenty of statistics from Protestant, Catholic, and secular organizations that indicate that the Evangelical Protestant denominations are still growing. Do you have statistics that indicate a decline in Evangelical Protestant denominations?

I think it might be that you have seen statistics that the “traditional” Evangelical Protestant denominations are losing members, but keep in mind that many people who are not “members” attend Evangelical Protestant churches, so the actual church attendance might be the same as always or bigger. Also, keep in mind that many of those who leave the “traditional” Evangelical Protestant denominations merely slide on over to a non-denominational Evangelical Protestant church/fellowship.

 

[otjm]

I’d encourage you to look at the study I linked to earlier (taking care, as I said above, to delete the extra characters that pasted in for whatever reason so that it actually loads). The trend is in fact generally downward after 1958 or so (note that the peak in 1958 was itself a local maximum, and that the decline immediately afterward was largely a kind of steady regression to the historical mean), but it turns downward pretty sharply right around 1970, collapsing to (really) unprecedented lows in the decade following.

I am assuming you are referring to the Gallup poll (I couldn’t find your link). Let’s look at the numbers.

1958 peak, 74%; to 1965 (end of Vatican 2), 67% - 7% decline, or an average of 1%/year.

1965, 67%, to 1975 55% - 12% decline, or 1.2% per year.

That is not a decline I would tern “downward pretty sharply”, or “collapsing to (really) unprecedented lows”. Nice try, in trying to tag it to the release of the OF, but no statistician would support you in any significant way.

And we can all agree that CARA probably does a much more accurate survey than Gallup by the way they phrase the question; but the fact remains that it is an urban myth that there was a precipitous, collapsing drop off. It was and has been pretty much a steady trickle since before Vatican 2 was even a dream. And as the most faithful group (those born pre Vatican 2) continue to die off, the statistic most likely will go lower simply because of the demographic attendance rate (or lack thereof).

 

[sw85]

I am assuming you are referring to the Gallup poll (I couldn’t find your link). Let’s look at the numbers.

1958 peak, 74%; to 1965 (end of Vatican 2), 67% - 7% decline, or an average of 1%/year.

1965, 67%, to 1975 55% - 12% decline, or 1.2% per year.

That is not a decline I would tern “downward pretty sharply”, or “collapsing to (really) unprecedented lows”. Nice try, in trying to tag it to the release of the OF, but no statistician would support you in any significant way.

And we can all agree that CARA probably does a much more accurate survey than Gallup by the way they phrase the question; but the fact remains that it is an urban myth that there was a precipitous, collapsing drop off. It was and has been pretty much a steady trickle since before Vatican 2 was even a dream. And as the most faithful group (those born pre Vatican 2) continue to die off, the statistic most likely will go lower simply because of the demographic attendance rate (or lack thereof).

If you think the Gallup data is inaccurate, why cite it at me? The paper I cited earlier uses Gallup data as a base and makes adjustments for its innate inaccuracies.

What it shows is a slight decline in the 50s (essentially regression to the mean after the local maximum of Mass attendance in the mid-to-late 50s), then a sharper decline beginning right around 1970. The effect is really quite profound: for U.S. Catholics, approximately 53% Mass attendance rate in 1969; by 1979, down to maybe 33% (and a very similar rate for English/Welsh Catholics).

Your argument is interesting, though. If things started getting bad immediately after the imposition of the OF, the hypothesis “the imposition of the OF is at least partly responsible” would seem to imply that things would continue to get bad or at least stay bad afterward, since the problems caused by the circumstances of the imposition of the OF (i.e., poor oversight, crummy translations, liturgical abuse) were not corrected for several decades after. Your argument seems to be that the imposition of the OF can’t be responsible because things continued to get bad at a pretty steady pace afterward, which is… odd. You realize that even an average yearly loss of 1% sustained over 40 years is pretty appalling, right? That if you project that trend forward indefinitely the proportion of Mass-going Catholics will necessarily converge with 0?

 

[petronus]

In England the Mass started to be celebrated in the vernacular on the first Sunday of Advent in the year of Our Lord 1964 .

There is a lot of claptrap written above the reform of the Liturgy by people who had no experience of the Eucharist before the reforms and by people who look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles .

I would be interested to know the facts about any Catholics who ceased to attend Mass because of the reforms . I know of none who did so . Yes NONE !

 

[Cat]

If you think the Gallup data is inaccurate, why cite it at me? The paper I cited earlier uses Gallup data as a base and makes adjustments for its innate inaccuracies.

What it shows is a slight decline in the 50s (essentially regression to the mean after the local maximum of Mass attendance in the mid-to-late 50s), then a sharper decline beginning right around 1970. The effect is really quite profound: for U.S. Catholics, approximately 53% Mass attendance rate in 1969; by 1979, down to maybe 33% (and a very similar rate for English/Welsh Catholics).

Your argument is interesting, though. If things started getting bad immediately after the imposition of the OF, the hypothesis “the imposition of the OF is at least partly responsible” would seem to imply that things would continue to get bad or at least stay bad afterward, since the problems caused by the circumstances of the imposition of the OF (i.e., poor oversight, crummy translations, liturgical abuse) were not corrected for several decades after. Your argument seems to be that the imposition of the OF can’t be responsible because things continued to get bad at a pretty steady pace afterward, which is… odd. You realize that even an average yearly loss of 1% sustained over 40 years is pretty appalling, right? That if you project that trend forward indefinitely the proportion of Mass-going Catholics will necessarily converge with 0?

I think that we, including myself, need to be careful about using statistics. They can prove or disprove anything! We need to remember that and not create animosity between each other over stats.

All the stats that I have seen cite small but steady GROWTH in Catholic churches over the last few decades. I usually read stats from Protestant sources, BTW, because I still receive several Protestant magazines and listen to Protestant programs. (Don’t hit me anyone–I KNOW a lot of those Christians–old friends–and I like to keep up with them.)

And what’s even more important and exciting, many of those who join the Catholic Church are converts to Catholicism from other Christian sects, or are converts to Christianity from nothing or from a non-Christian religion! That’s really cool, and it demonstrates that Catholics are evangelizing! (Many of the Protestant denominations can cite growth, but it’s all “transfer” growth–Christians quit other Christian churches to join a new denomination.)

At any rate, I’m sure that we could find stats that “prove” just the opposite! So we need to have a little healthy skepticism of all stats.

 

[Kevin12]

The modern tendency is to say that the social surface doesn’t matter, all that matters is what’s really going on underneath. This gets it absolutely wrong. It’s like saying the surface of the earth doesn’t matter, what matters is the core of the earth. We live on the surface. How reality is perceived and experienced is at least as important a fact as what that reality actually, objectively is.

For such a hypothetical person, the social surface of the time conduces to the belief that the Church has acknowledged the fundamental correctness of Protestantism. What he sees, after all, is a series of changes that almost perfectly address Protestant objections to the Mass, downplaying the ontological superiority of the ordained priesthood (by turning him around, dressing him in less elaborate vestments, reducing his language to the ordinary and commonplace, etc.), and so on.

.

You are just obfuscating the issue with a bad metaphor. Everything Christ ever said gives me the impression that he would have looked at traditionalists who are so obsessed with rituals and external appearances as going against the way he told people to live.

I linked an article that shows that the decline in the Church happened in other mainline Protestant sects, and that the supposed stability is due to the rise of Evangelicals. Furthermore, I have never been in a Church without a confessional, and I strongly doubt there were any alters smashed with sledgehammers - for someone who claims not to be a traditionalist, you certainly have their flair for hyperbole.

But as I said, I think this is pointless. I’ve trads (they use this term themselves) want to believe that Mass attendance is down because people perceive the Church as being too liberal, they can go ahead and do so. But since the Church has many other and I think more pressing crises on its hands than people shaking hands with non-family members after the consecration (for example), I hope they won’t begrudge the Church taking care of those first.

 

[YoungTradCath]

You are just obfuscating the issue with a bad metaphor. Everything Christ ever said gives me the impression that he would have looked at traditionalists who are so obsessed with rituals and external appearances as going against the way he told people to live.

Another case of the ever-present false dichotomy.