New secular study finds Vatican II triggered a decline in Catholic Mass attendance worldwide

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New secular study finds Vatican II triggered a decline in Catholic Mass attendance worldwide
Economic research found that religious service attendance in Catholic nations significantly decreased compared with all other countries beginning in 1965, the final year of Vatican II.



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Jul 29, 2025
(LifeSiteNews) — A newly published secular study found that Vatican II “triggered a decline” in worldwide Catholic Mass attendance relative to religious service attendance of other religions, including Protestant Christianity.

By examining the religious service attendance rates for 66 countries as far back as 1920, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that “compared to other countries, Catholic countries experienced a steady decline in the monthly adult religious service attendance rate starting immediately after Vatican II” in 1965, the final year of the council.

Catholic countries were defined as those with a Catholic population of 50% or greater and included nations such as Ireland, Italy, Austria, France, Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico.

A graph representing the researchers’ data shows that monthly religious service attendance in Catholic countries decreased by at least 20 percentage points relative to that of all other countries as well as relative to “Christian” countries, with a significant decline seen first in the period from 1965 to 1974. Mass attendance in Catholic countries fell on average by four percentage points per decade from 1965 to 2015.

These findings accord with those of French historian Guillaume Cuchet, who in 2022 published an analysis that found 1965, the year the Second Vatican Council ended, marked the beginning of the “collapse” of the practice of Catholicism in France.

As Phil Lawler has noted, the findings of NBER regarding Vatican II’s effects on Mass attendance are noteworthy because NBER is a “heavyweight” economic research institution with “no dog in the fight” of Catholicism’s internal debates.

While NBER has not investigated what it was specifically about Vatican II that precipitated the steep worldwide drop in Mass attendance, its researchers have cited several potential factors proposed by author Andrew Greeley, including changes to the Mass itself, a new ecumenical outlook on other religions, and the abolishing the requirement of certain practices such as abstinence from meat on Fridays.

Significant changes to the Mass itself began with the implementation of The First Instruction on the Proper Implementation of the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, Inter oecumenici, on March 7, 1965. While it aimed to make the Mass more “accessible” and palatable, its changes would have come across as foreign and even as a shock to a number of Catholics for whom the Mass had remained virtually unchanged their entire life.

For example, Inter oecumenici stipulated that “the main altar should preferably be freestanding, to permit walking around it and celebration facing the people.” This itself is a radical change, since it imposed a literal 180-degree reversal of the very orientation of the Mass.

Already in 1965, Psalm 42 at the beginning of the Mass, and the Last Gospel and Leonine prayers at the end were suppressed; the congregation was to recite the Our Father together with the priest; the lessons, epistle, and gospel were to be read or sung facing the people; in non-solemn Masses, laypeople were to “read the lessons and epistles with the intervening chants” as the priest sat and listened; Mass-goers were to say “Amen” before receiving Holy Communion.

As the French historian Cuchet noted in reference to declining Mass attendance, while these changes in ritual may seem “secondary to intellectuals,” they “are actually psychological and anthropological determinants.”

While liturgical changes would have been the most vivid and palpable of Vatican II’s effects for most Mass-going Catholics, researchers have argued that Vatican II’s apparent doctrinal shift should not be discounted.

“The explicit questioning of centuries-old doctrines, such as the forbidding of birth control, may have shattered the perception of an immovable, truth-holding Church and replaced it with a model whereby individuals had a more direct relationship with God and were, therefore, less dependent on the Church and its formal services,” noted the researchers, echoing Greeley.

While the Church went on to uphold its ban on contraception, it was leaked to the press in 1967 that a significant majority of the members of Pope Paul VI’s commission on birth control, including 60 of 64 theologians and nine of 15 cardinals, supported lifting the ban.

While the Catholic Church cannot change doctrine, Vatican II was unique in Church history for ambiguous statements that gave the widespread impression that the Church had changed its teaching. For example, Unitatis Redintegratio said it is sometimes permissible to hold common worship with non-Catholics, whereas at least three Church councils have explicitly prohibited praying in common with heretics.

For Catholics who may not have been keeping abreast of the changes of the Vatican II documents, the slew of changes in practice, such as the abandonment of certain devotional prayers and the “sudden silence” on the Four Last Things during sermons (Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell) may have similarly given the impression that the Church had undergone a substantial change in teaching. As Dr. John Pepino put it, while summarizing the research of Cuchet, “An institution that admits to having been wrong yesterday may well be wrong today, too.”

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Opinion:

The Data Is In! Vatican II Devastated the Church
A Harvard economist and a Catholic layman both prove what NeoCatholic Popesplainers disingenuously told us was a “logical fallacy.”

Chris Jackson via Hiraeth in Exile [slightly adapted] | Jul 30, 2025

Every time a traditional Catholic points out the correlation between Vatican II and the catastrophic collapse of the Church, some smirking Novus Ordo apologist jumps in with a smug little Latin phrase: post hoc ergo propter hoc.

After this, therefore because of this.

“Just because Vatican II happened and then the Church collapsed,” they say, “doesn’t mean Vatican II caused the collapse. Correlation is not causation!”

Well, no. Correlation isn’t always causation. But sometimes? It is. That’s literally how evidence works. You observe cause and effect, test for confounding variables, rule out alternatives, and reach a conclusion. And that’s exactly what two very different studies, one from Harvard economists in 2025, and one from a Catholic layman in 2003, have done.

Together, they confirm what anyone with eyes to see already knows: Vatican II didn’t “renew” the Church. It decimated it. And the collapse wasn’t accidental. It followed directly from the very reforms the Council enacted.

Let’s walk through the proof.


The Harvard Study: Vatican II Caused a Global Catholic Collapse

In July 2025, three economists, Robert Barro (Harvard), Edgard Dewitte (Oxford), and Laurence Iannaccone (Chapman), published a monumental working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries.”

Using retrospective survey data from over 200,000 people across four decades, they reconstructed religious attendance rates going back to the 1920s in 66 countries. It is the most ambitious dataset on religious behavior ever created.

And what did they find?

“Vatican II, in 1962–1965, triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations.”

Yes, you read that right. Not “correlated with.” Not “followed by.” Triggered.

The economists applied an event-study design, a method used in economics to test the causal effects of discrete historical events, and confirmed that religious attendance in Catholic countries plummeted after Vatican II, while Protestant and Orthodox countries did not show the same pattern. Nor did Communist suppression have the same global effect. In fact, religious practice in some post-Communist countries rebounded.

But Vatican II? It was uniquely destructive.

Barro et al. write:

“Rates of religious-service attendance in predominantly Catholic countries started to decrease relative to those of all other countries and to those of other Christian countries precisely in the aftermath of Vatican II… The Catholic relative attendance rate fell by four percentage points per decade between 1965 and 2015.”

In other words, they ruled out “post hoc ergo propter hoc.” They showed that Catholic decline wasn’t part of a general secularization trend. It was uniquely Catholic. It began right after Vatican II. And it didn’t stop.

They even considered other historical shocks, like the collapse of Communism and the effects of war or depression, and found none had such a consistent, negative impact on religious practice as Vatican II did.


The Layman’s Indictment: A Church in Freefall

In 2003, Catholic author Kenneth C. Jones published The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators, collecting decades of raw Church statistics. In a devastating section titled “Vatican II Renewal: Myth or Reality?” he demolishes the lie that the Church was in crisis before the Council or that Vatican II sparked any sort of authentic renewal.

Here are the facts Jones assembled:

In 1960, the U.S. Church had:

• 53,796 priests
  
• 39,896 seminarians
  
• 168,527 nuns
  
• 9,897 parochial schools
  
• 4.2 million Catholic school students
  
• 1.3 million infant baptisms
  
• 146,212 adult baptisms
  

It was the largest, most robust Catholic system in the world. And it was growing. Between 1955 and 1960, the number of priests increased by 7,000. New seminaries were being built to meet demand.

And then came the Council.

By 2002:

• Priests had dropped to 45,000
  
• Seminarians: 4,700 (a 90% collapse)
  
• Nuns: 75,000 (average age 68)
  
• Mass attendance: down from 75% to 25%
  
• Religious orders: in terminal decline
  
• Annulments skyrocketed from 338 in 1968 to 50,000 in 2002
  
• 70% of young Catholics denied the Real Presence
  

And the trend has not reversed. Jones cited Ratzinger’s 1984 admission that Vatican II’s effects were not what anyone hoped:

“Expected was a new Catholic unity… instead we have been exposed to dissension… Expected was a great step forward; instead… a progressive process of decadence… The net result therefore seems negative.”

Even Ratzinger called it. And yet the myth persists.


The Stupidest Argument in Catholic History

There are people who look at all of this, statistical collapse in every measurable category of Catholic life, and say, “But that doesn’t mean Vatican II caused it.”

They will actually admit that the seminaries emptied, the convents died, the Mass was abandoned, the catechism vanished, the faith was lost, but Vatican II wasn’t the cause.

Why not?

Because saying so would make you guilty of the “post hoc” fallacy.

Except it’s not a fallacy when the event is temporally proximate, globally consistent, uniquely Catholic in its devastation, and empirically verified using control groups. That’s called a causal link.

And let’s be honest, if any other event had preceded such a collapse (say, a papal bull banning the Novus Ordo, or a global declaration of sedevacantism), these same people would have no problem assigning blame.

The “post hoc” canard is not a serious argument. It’s a defense mechanism for those who cannot emotionally bear the possibility that Vatican II was not just a mistake, but a catastrophe.


When the Wreckage Is That Obvious…

You don’t need a PhD in economics to read the signs of the times. But now, thanks to Barro and Iannaccone, even the data confirms what tradition has always known: the Council did not renew the Church. It gutted it.

There was no “new Pentecost.” There was no “springtime.” There was only the worst collapse of faith in Church history.

The rot didn’t begin after the Council. The rot was the Council.

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Pope Leo XIV and the Cruel Reality of the Vatican II Revolution

Robert Morrison, Remnant Columnist | July 28, 2025

In his July 27th Angelus address, Pope Leo XIV spoke of our need to avoid cruelty to others if we want to be able call God our “Father”:

“When we recite the Our Father, in addition to celebrating the grace of being children of God, we also express our commitment to responding to this gift by loving one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Reflecting on this, one of the Fathers of the Church wrote: ‘We must remember . . . and know that when we call God ‘our Father’ we ought to behave as children of God’ (Saint Cyprian of Carthage, De Dom. orat., 11), and another adds: ‘You cannot call the God of all kindness your Father if you preserve a cruel and inhuman heart; for in this case you no longer have in you the mark of the heavenly Father’s kindness’ (Saint John Chrysostom, De orat. Dom., 3). We cannot pray to God as ‘Father’ and then be harsh and insensitive towards others.”

As grateful as we may be to Leo XIV for this pious exhortation, we are left to wonder what the new pontiff intends to do to address one of the most wicked cruelties in the world today: the Vatican’s continued attacks on the unadulterated Catholic Faith and its persecution of those souls who want nothing more than to practice our religion as faithfully as possible. Borrowing the words of St. John Chrysostom from the Angelus, can Leo XIV call God his Father if he maintains his silence about these unfathomably evil cruelties?

To put the matter in perspective, we can consider the first questions and responses in the Baptism ceremony:

“Priest: N, what do you ask of the Church of God? Response: Faith. Priest: What does Faith offer you? Response: Eternal life.”

The Faith is what souls have wanted from the Catholic Church ever since Our Lord established it. However, in his 1977 sermon for priestly ordinations at Ecône, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre asserted that since around the time of the Second Vatican Council the Vatican has been turning souls away from the Faith:

“What was the first word the priest said to us when we were infants and could not speak for ourselves, and to which our godparents replied? ‘What do you ask of the Church of God?’ That was the question the priest put to our godparents: What do you ask of the Church of God? We ask for faith. That was what our godparents answered. And now we too ask from the Church, or from those who say they are of the Church, those occupying important posts in the Church, those responsible for that faith — we ask them: ‘Preserve the Faith for us, give us the Faith. That Catholic Faith is what we want. We want no other.’ ‘Why do you ask for Faith?’ the priest said to our godparents. ‘We want Faith because Faith brings us to Eternal Life.’ Why are we here below unless to gain Eternal Life? We have no other purpose here below except to gain Eternal Life; life on earth is a fleeting life, an ephemeral life-a few days, few years, a few decades. We have to choose if we want Eternal Life-Yes or No. We want Eternal Life, and for that we want the Catholic Faith. But we are compelled to state that for fifteen or twenty years those with the highest authority in the Church, the Holy See and the Vatican, have been turning away, turning us away from the Catholic Faith and have become the friends of our enemies.”

Was Archbishop Lefebvre accurate in his assessment that the Vatican has been turning souls away from the Faith?

As one indication among many, we can consider the 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study recently cited by Rorate Caeli:

“Using an event-study design, we find that rates of religious-service attendance in predominantly Catholic countries started to decrease relative to those of all other countries and to those of other Christian countries precisely in the aftermath of Vatican II. This result holds for adult and child religious-service attendance and also holds when using the share of a country’s catholic adherents as a continuous measure of a country’s exposure. Overall, the Catholic relative attendance rate fell by four percentage points per decade between 1965 and 2015. This pattern is consistent with religion modeled as a club good (Iannaccone [1992]) and with the view that Vatican II shattered the perception of an immovable, truthholding Church (Greeley [2004], MacCulloch [2010]). More generally, these results might explain why many religious authorities are reluctant to modernize their doctrine or reduce barriers to religious participation.”

This sad story of declining Mass attendance after Vatican II is familiar to many who have studied the crisis in the Church and certainly comports with Archbishop Lefebvre’s assessment. The changes that Rome has promoted in furtherance of the Vatican II

Another tragic development which aligns with Archbishop Lefebvre’s assertion is the reality that so many truths of the Catholic Faith are no longer accepted by many of those who identify as Catholic. Consider, for example, that many bishops, priests, and laity appear to reject one or more of the following infallible (De fide.) truths, among others, from Dr. Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma:

• “The Sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for the salvation of mankind.”
  
• “The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ are truly, really and substantially present in the Eucharist.”
  
• “Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded from the Beatific Vision.”
  
• “Without the special help of God the justified cannot persevere to the end in justification.”
  
• “God gives all the just sufficient grace for the observation of the Divine Commandments.”
  
• “The Human Will remains free under the influence of efficacious grace, which is not irresistible.”
  
• “There is a grace which is truly sufficient and yet remains inefficacious.”
  
• “The justification of an adult is not possible without Faith.”
  
• “Without special Divine Revelation no one can know with the certainty of faith if he be in the state of grace.”
  
• “The grace by which we are justified may be lost, and is lost by every grievous sin.”
  
• “Membership of the Church is necessary for all men for salvation.”
  

Most of these truths are at least implicitly contradicted by the tenets of false ecumenism and religious liberty, which have thrived since the Council. Far from trying to rectify the erroneous beliefs prevalent among so many nominal Catholics, Rome has continuously exacerbated these evils by turning a blind eye to heresy while persecuting those Traditional Catholics who adhere to what the Church has always taught. Archbishop Lefebvre’s assessment from 1977 thus appears entirely correct: “those with the highest authority in the Church, the Holy See and the Vatican, have been turning away, turning us away from the Catholic Faith and have become the friends of our enemies.”

For decades, Traditional Catholics have asked the Church for the unadulterated Faith. In response, the Vatican has effectively made itself like the evil father described by Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount.

For the sake of argument, though, let us just assume that the Vatican II revolution was correct in advancing false ecumenism and religious liberty. As we know, the progressives in Rome have used false ecumenism and religious liberty to praise, defend, and even advance all Christian denominations — Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Methodists all have a place of honor in the ecumenical assemblies sponsored by the Vatican. How is it, then, that the only Christians dishonored and persecuted by the Vatican are those Traditional Catholics who make great sacrifices to adhere to what the Church has always taught? The phrase “diabolical disorientation” seems like an entirely accurate answer.

For decades, Traditional Catholics have asked the Church for the unadulterated Faith. In response, the Vatican has effectively made itself like the evil father described by Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount:

“Or what man is there among you, of whom if his son shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone? Or if he shall ask him a fish, will he reach him a serpent?” (Matthew 7:9-10)

Leo XIV has inherited this Vatican regime that cruelly offers stones to those who ask for bread, and hurls serpents at those who ask for fish. We did not expect him to reverse the Vatican II revolution overnight, but three months is long enough to at the very least speak out against the rampant heresies prevalent among his bishops and assure Traditional Catholics that they will no longer be persecuted by Rome. Every passing day of Leo XIV’s silence adds to the cruelty of the Vatican II revolution, such that he risks incurring the judgment of his own Angelus message: “We cannot pray to God as ‘Father’ and then be harsh and insensitive towards others.” We pray that he will heed his own words while he has time.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!