Okay, but this is not the complete story, seeing the decline of Mass attendance. One would expect those who still attended Mass were to some degree accepting of those changes, which included relaxation of the Eucharistic fast among other things. What about those who never came back?
I decided against going to a Catholic university in 1965. I stopped attending Mass altogether shortly after that. Some lady I was dating in 1970 talked me into coming back and I did. I at least figured I would share the pain with everyone else. I certainly didn’t see much enthusiasm, no one went to confession anymore, everyone dragged themselves to communion, though you are right about the English, although from time to time a Latin OF was said and people did come out to attend it. I concluded that people still enjoyed some mystery surrounding the Mass. So it was surprising to me how people overwhelming rejected JPII’s permission to say the older Mass.
The decline in Mass attendance started in the late 1950’s. No one ever bothers with this fact, and a goodly number never bother with the facts of the actual decline, which has been steady at about 1 to 2% per year over decades now, dropping down to the low to mid 20’s. We just get the urban myths.
If we look at recent history, Mass attendance (according to CARA) increased after 9/11. Not surprisingly, a crisis has a tendency to cause some people to focus - or as my dad, a cannon cocker in WW2 said, there aren’t any atheists in foxholes. The blip was not overly long lasting; but then, the attack was a single act of war which was not followed up immediately by conflict.
It is not therefore particularly surprising that more and more people, as things stabilized after WW2, were church oriented. And as we stabilized economically and politically after WW2, there would come a time where people’s religious enthusiasm would begin to wane; add to that the increase in secular influences, including ABC and no-fault divorce, the arrival in first the youth culture and then eventually the popular culture of “free sex”, and the rise of more secularism all have worked to distance people from Christ.
When you and I were in school, Latin was widely taught both in private and in public schools, but the classics were making way for other languages, primarily German, French and Spanish. As more and more “tweaking” occurred to curricula and more and more pointy headed theories made their way from the intelligencia of academia to the world of politics and education (a deadly mix if ever there was one), Latin was dropped.
Urban mythology has vast numbers of people dropping out of the Church when the OF hit; but the real world facts have never supported that. Vast numbers of people took to the vernacular like the proverbial duck to water. And again, urban mythology would have one to believe that each and every last one of the 17,000 +/- parishes in the US suddenly went bonkers, having 40 and 50 year old women who may have taken ballet back in the third through fifth grades trying to twirl and pirouette up the isle. That didn’t happen; that it occurred in some parishes on occasion is true (I have seen it exactly once in 68 years) but again it is urban mythology that it was all over the place and in each nook and cranny.
It still baffles me that people can’t understand that the average, and maybe even above average person prays in their native tongue and were doing so 60, 70 100 and more years ago, with the exception of the Mass. and while people might have Latin responses memorized, most of them once they got beyond high school forgot most of the Latin they may have been taught in school. In addition, the vast majority who were taught Latin were taught it as a translated language as opposed to a spoken one, a fact that adds to the distancing from Latin in the Mass.
It was not for no reason that people could buy a missal with Latin on one side and English on the other; hardly anyone was proficient enough to translate on the fly. And it is far easier for most to listen in English that to read English while another language is spoken.
Most people are not particularly keyed into rubrics, and can hardly articulate the difference in the rubrics between the OF and the EF, beyond “Father says Mass with his back to the people”, liturgical East being largely unknown. They pretty much operate on “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
