What were the post-Vatican II changes like to live through?

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When I was in Catholic school, if a girl forgot her head covering, I gave her my handkerchief and she used a bobby pin to hold it in place. I still remember my mother’s hat boxes.

I would like a clear, referenced reason for the decline in Catholic Church attendance after the primary change, the liturgical reform, was fully in place.
 
The Gallup poll i s not the most accurate; I prefer to use CARA as they investigate the Church, not the Protestant churches.

And according to Cara, around 1957 was the peak in Mass attendance (note, since others may not be familiar with dates, that was before Pope John 23rd was made Pope) and it has continued down per year more or less hovering around 1% per year.

And contrary to those in the past in these threads who posited a massive dropping our of the Church after the OF was promulgated, it never happened.

Church attendance went down after 1957 and has continued down; it is near impossible to attribute it to Vatican 2, or the OF, or Humanae Vitae.

And while we are on Humanae Vitae, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of women were using the Pill before Pope Paul 6th started his first group (there were two, or rather, the first was greatly expanded) investigating the use of the Pill. In fact, the Pill was not originally created for the purpose of contraception.

And I have yet to meet anyone who “hates Latin”. There is a vast, vast difference between hating a language and wanting to hear the Mass in the vernacular. To imply otherwise is slanderous )okay, since it is being written, libelous). I don’t hate Vietnamese, nor do I hate Spanish; and I attend Mass in both of those languages occasionally but I far, far prefer to attend Mass in English.
 
otjm said:
You really need to stop insinuating that others who have had a different experience than you are implied liars.
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I agree. It is very bad form.

People have different experiences, reasons, feelings, and understanding about any given event. People aren’t liars or “wrong” simply because they disagree with your position.
 
edwest211 said:
At the time of the introduction of the new Missal, it did not seem necessary to issue specific norms for the possible use of the earlier Missal. Probably it was thought that it would be a matter of a few individual cases which would be resolved, case by case, on the local level.
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This is a new one on me. My understanding has always been that when the Novus Ordo Missae was introduced, the 1962 Latin missal was to be completely done away with, with celebration limited to special cases such as the indult in England and Wales (the “Agatha Christie” indult), elderly and infirm priests celebrating sine populo, and so on. Aside from that, it seems that it was “just understood” the days of the traditional Latin Mass had come to an abrupt end.
 
otjm said:
And I have yet to meet anyone who “hates Latin”. There is a vast, vast difference between hating a language and wanting to hear the Mass in the vernacular.
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I had two aunts who converted to Catholicism in the 1950’s. They both were very happy when mass changed over to the vernacular. They didn’t “hate Latin”. They were just happy they didn’t have to read along in order to understand what was being said.

I attend the EF from time to time. I quite like it. It is a fundamentally different experience from Mass in the OF (and I really like the EF), but there is a lot to be said for not having to follow along with a missal in order to understand the readings, for example.
 
I was born in '64 so I don’t remember mass in Latin as a child, though I have gone as an adult. I remember communion rails and I miss them, I’d like to kneel for communion, but without the rail that might be problematic getting back up 😉

Can’t really answer as to anything else as I was too young.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
My understanding has always been that when the Novus Ordo Missae was introduced, the 1962 Latin missal was to be completely done away with
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So was the understanding of everyone who wanted to continue to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass until FSSP got a special indult in 1988. I’d never go so far as to say Pope Benedict lied in Summorum Pontificum, but just because it was never abrogated doesn’t mean that it wasn’t intentionally decimated. It’s kinda a case of formal vs material abrogation (my terms).
 
I can suggest three factors which may well have had an impact on Mass attendance.

After World War 2, there was a change in society driven by these factors.
  1. suburbs were started; this after WW2 moved people out of ethnic conclaves and removed them from the extended family ties - something which had an effective check on behavior.
  2. the massive GI Bill gave hundreds of thousands (if not more) the opportunity to go to college/university - places which even then had a streak of secularism.
  3. Middle management and sales forces increased, resulting in more moves away from the extended family; now instead of living in a major city near family, people were moved hundreds, even thousands of miles away; again out from under the view of the extended family.
And all of that played easily into the adoption of secular attitudes.

I have been involved in Catholics Returning Home; and the reasons why people have left the Church are numerous, including the drop in catechesis after Vatican 2; but when I have people in the program who were teenagers to young adults prior to Vatican 2, it goes back to an underlying issue of secularism “infecting” their attitudes about Church.

And I will grant easily that the failure of catechesis after Vatican 2, when the Baltimore Catechism was tossed out with disdain and a “Jesus is my buddy” soft-soap approach to the Faith was substituted, that the groundwork was laid for a ripening of secularism to infect those who, unlike their grandparents and great grandparents, trooped off to college.

The facts, however, are that the decrease in Mass attendance started well before all of this, and the drop off of attendance has been consistently small, averaging around 1% per year. Attendance in the age bracket hovers around 18%; what happens then? They leave home… with often a poor catechetical experience, having grown up with parents who likely had a poor catechetical experience, and whose parents (the current drop out kids’ grand parents)…

So we can blame a lot on catechesis; but that does not explain why things were dropping off well before anything you posit, and the fact that the drop off has been consistently small in % going back before what you claim as the source.
 
TheMortenBay said:
My understanding has always been that when the Novus Ordo Missae was introduced, the 1962 Latin missal was to be completely done away with
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In traditionalist circles, the bull Quo primum (1570) issued by Pope St Pius V is a pretty “hot potato” for some. In a nutshell, some use it to say that the Mass was never to be changed, that there can never be a “new missal”, and on top of that, that no priest may ever be forbidden to say the traditional Latin Mass. And variations on that theme.

The fancy word to describe the pre-Summorum Pontificum situation is “obrogated”, i.e., the old missal was not banned outright, but the new missal was made normative. As a practical matter, the old missal was, as you say, “materially abrogated”.
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You’ll have to provide a chart that shows how many women used the birth control pill in the US after FDA approval in 1960. Most of the country lived on farms then. The big cities were big but fewer people lived in them. Women I knew rejected The Pill as useless. Long before this modern convenience, women had no, one or two kids, with two being the average. Larger numbers were seen on farms. The Pill did not get a marketing push until 1967 and was only available by prescription. I know how the chemistry of The Pill was arrived at.

The Second Vatican Council was in the planning stage in 1958 and Pope John XXIII formally announced the Council in January, 1959. The Church was very aware of conditions inside the Church and the outside world.

You’ll note the Gallup chart shows a decline right in the critical 1965-1966 period. That was the start of an all-out attack against the Church. It appears Protestants were in far worse shape.

Here is another chart:

http://www.traditionalcatholicpries...e-and-after-vatican-ii-statistics-do-not-lie/
 
No. The fact is the 1963 missal could still be used. I believe some wanted it buried. Fortunately, a reprint edition was published.
 
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The whole question is interesting in terms of Sacrosanctum Concilium. I seriously doubt, when the 2,147 bishops of the world voted in favor of the document on December 4, 1963, that nay of them envisioned that there would be the changes made to the Mass as suggested in the document, and that we would have two parallel forms of the Mass - which is another way of saying that as in the past, there would be one form, with whatever changes were made to it.

Much has been said about “what was intended” or not intended, and I would suggest that we look back to an old saying: “You never want to watch two things being made: sausage and law”.

Someone on a different thread posted a speech given by a bishop 14 months earlier; the bishop was clearly against the use of the vernacular. I am sure he was not alone; but nowhere is there a tallying of those who were totally against the vernacular, those who would accept a bit, those who would accept a lot, and those who wanted it totally in the vernacular. I recently had someone reference a writer who posited that the vernacular was intended to be far more limited. My response was that the writer spoke from their own perspective, and failed to acknowledge that out of 2,147 bishops, what resulted was a series of compromises couched in language which was not limiting and that the spectrum was wide as to opinions.

And out of all the bishops of the world, only 4 voted against SC.

One could argue all day and the next night as to what was intended; but a look at the language as well as some view of the opinions expressed during the consideration of SC would indicate that SC was written in a manner that allowed a lot of leeway. And without someone going in and actually researching each and every speech and draft, we are left with personal opinions being passed off as indicative of what was intended.

As to the “hot potato” issue, what laid under that was a failure to understand what is discipline and what is doctrine, and a 2,000 year old practice that one pope could not bind a subsequent pope on matters of discipline.
 
maryjk said:
It had everything to do with a priest telling my mother that having a hysterectomy without permission from the Church was going to send her to Hell. That her job on earth was to produce children, and it didn’t matter if it killed her. All that because she asked a priest, in passing, for a blessing before her surgery. Crazy.
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I’m curious about where your mom lived at the time. I’ve spoken to many people who experienced this in Québec, where I live, prior to the Council. Our local Church here was more than a tad Jansenist, with a close Quebec variant, Lacouturism. My understanding is that there were similar experiences in Ireland, that I imagine got exported with the Irish diaspora.

Most recently the wife of our choirmaster to me that she remembers here father exploding in rage at a priest who refused absolution because he dared tell the priest he intended to use NFP. The family was dirt poor and could barely feed the 4 kids they already had.

I have heard enough of these anecdotes to understand why there was a backlash against the Church, and against Humane Vitae.
 
  1. I was there after World War II. I was raised in a highly ethnic enclave surrounded by other highly ethnic enclaves. I could speak two different languages. Most people spoke a language other than English. Extended families were common. Communities with shared values were common. And boy, were there a lot of effective checks on behavior.
  2. The GI Bill was good. However, unskilled work was easy to get and there were countless cases where a father or uncle got a young man into Ford, Chrysler and GM. A lot of truck drivers were needed in big cities. Secularism would not start to infect Catholic universities until 1967.
  3. No one forgot their extended family even if they were across the ocean. I recall all the letter writing and the occasional long-distance phone call. The constant, never to be forgotten traditions and greeting cards, especially religious greeting cards. God was on our minds daily, not just Sunday.
The distortion and lack of good catechesis after Vatican II was deliberate, especially in 1970 and later.
I watched the totally secular strangers enter our neighborhoods to spread corruption after Vatican II.

Among the most highly educated people I know and knew, both were farm girls.
I will continue to use the Gallup chart. Please post your information.
 
edwest211 said:
Pope Benedict promoted the Latin Mass.
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I don’t think he promoted the Latin Mass. He taught that the ordinary and extraordinary are two legitmate forms of the same Roman Rite. One is not more legitimate than another.
 
What was taken away - the statues, the altar and communion rails - obviously mattered to those who disposed of them or hid them away. Statues, for example, were visible outward signs. We understood them as such. Why was it important to get rid of them at the time?
 
edwest211 said:
Pope Benedict promoted the Latin Mass.
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Pope Benedict made it clear that the ordinary (in the sense of “most usual”) form of the Mass was the Mass of Paul VI. The motu proprio makes clear that it was a concession to those who remain attached to the Old Mass. Other than saying the old missal was never abrogated, I don’t read anything in the document to suggest that the old Mass was being promoted at the expense of the new Mass, or at any expense at all; he simply allowed it, attaching some conditions on its use.
 
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