A reasonable person would look at what else was happening at the same time, to determine what the actual casuation was.
It is only the simplistic person who will buy into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument for causation.
The sacrament that is more telling than the reduction in the number of vocations is marriage; the fall-off of marriages and the surrounding issues are far more valid evidence of the causation than simply looking at the reduction in the number of ordinations.
Marriage has been impacted by a number of issues, including materialism (which took off after WW2, when we started the move to dual incomes and women moving into non-traditional jobs); the rise of ABC which started in 1930 and by the early 1960’s was fueled by the new form - the Pill; the almost instantaneous rejection of Humanae Vitae and the the following massive increase in the use of ABC; the sexual revolution which reached a fever pitch in the mid 1960s; the gradual move since the 1960s to later and later marriage; the change in civil laws which previously made criminal both ABC and “shacking up” and the massive increase in both categories since then; and the move to “no fault” divorce which lead to a mssive increase in divorces.
Those who obstinately confuse the reform intended by Vatican 2 with the dissent that followed after Vatican 2 and is nowhere prompted by the documents - or for that matter, the OF - are either too intellectually lazy to do any research, or they are approaching intellectual dishonesty.
Many of the same issues that impacted the sacrament of marriage have had an impact - direct or indirect - on other sacraments. The dissent that over-ran HV spread like wild fire; if the Vatican was (theoretically) so far off the mark on sexual issues and was to be ignored, then where else were they to be ignored? Where else were they simply a bunch of out-of-touch old people who simply “didn’t get it”?
It is not the alternatives which are within the OF which caused priests to so thoroughly ignore the rubrics; it was the expanding idea that whatever Rome said was irrelevant, and that relevance had to be applied at the local level.
Vatican 2 did not create the changes in society, nor do the documents support any of the craziness that has gone on since 1965. Nor was it a few priests, ordained after 1965, who gave us the chaos in the OF; it was priests who were ordained before Vatican 2, many of them well before it. Blaming the necessary reform of the Church - which according to this pope and the last one still has not been fully implemented - for the subsequent chaos is simply to ignore the multitude of issues impacting both the clergy and the people in the pews. Experimentation had already started in the Mass before we got the OF handed to us, and that at a time where the rubrics were more formal and complex and a time where authority was far more reaching and (supposedly) effective.
And any business which fires its leader over things which the leader has no control is a business which will fail shortly.
