The Causes of the Decline in Influence of The Roman Catholic Church Following The Second Vatican Council
**This is an original analysis**
“The smoke of Satan entered the temple of God from some fissure”
-Pope Paul VI [38]
An Exploration into the Potential Impact of the Council in the Church’s Competitive Struggle
By Alexander Jaros
This analysis will explore the 1962-1965 ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church, known as Vatican II, and the potential of its impact on the concurrent and following trend of secularization that impacted the Church, particularly in the form of contributing to declining member participation and growing disaffiliation. Many traditionalists within the Church have been quick to accuse this council of causing current problems, namely low attendance, fewer clergy, less perceived mysticism and ornate ritual, and the evermore common liberal interpretation of doctrine and liturgy. Growing up as a Roman Catholic and attending very traditional Marianist schooling for seven years before university, this has been a view that many of my peers and I have observed and passively agreed with, but which I have not had the chance to adequately investigate. I have found that there is indeed some merit to this claim, but the argument cannot be reduced to just this council. While Vatican II did cause a less “enchanted” pastoral paradigm shift within the Church that certainly changed its relationship with the world, it in many respects maintained a conservative, or traditional, approach to these changes. There were forces at play before and after the council which were more significant factors in the Church’s decline in influence and relevance in an increasingly secular age, particularly poor Church “self-marketing”, both in general and seen in specific cases such as the reaction of the laity to the encyclical Humanae Vitae. These forces have played a bigger part in the Church’s decline and fit well within the popular “Supply-Side” theory’s application to religious institutions.
Before beginning to explore the council, it should be noted that this paper will be written from a doctrinally-orthodox Roman Catholic perspective and will freely use the vocabulary of the Church in its discussion of the council. It is important to begin by explaining the major topics of Vatican II and the major outcomes of the council. This explanation can be here only cursory, as the three-year meeting covered a massive amount of material and the 2,600 scholarly religious participants had much to say. To give an idea of the breadth of topics of the council, as it sought to address how the Catholic Church would conduct itself in all respects in the modern world, one can view the document sourcebook put together by the Jesuit Walter M. Abbot and his Latin translator, the Very Reverend Monsignor Joseph Gallagher, just after the council. It is nearly 800 dense pages of theological, doctrinal, liturgical, and pastoral discussion beginning with the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium), proceeding by covering topics such as ecumenism and the role of the laity, and ending with a Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae).[1] Faced with so much information, this paper will focus on the most relevant and significant changes that went into effect following the council’s close and the conflicts that followed.
Vatican II was called for markedly different purposes than most ecumenical councils, with its aim, evident from its initiating pontiff Pope John XXIII’s beginning exhortation to its final documents, being explicitly pastoral and liturgical rather than doctrinal, something seen in the previous Vatican I council’s explanation of papal infallibility.[2] The council occurred at the end of the high-water mark of post-war church participation and sought to address the place and strategy of the Catholic Church in the modern, industrialized age. Some of its pastoral and liturgical changes include the end of the mandated worldwide practice of the Tridentine Latin Mass, which had been the traditional Roman Rite mass since 1570; relaxed dietary restrictions, particularly during the liturgical season of Lent; relaxed confessional obligations and laity service attire expectations; the relinquishment of the claim by the Church of being the one true church; and the official renouncement of the Church’s claims to power in relation to nation-states.[3] Further, the well-regarded church historian John O’Malley, S.J. has demonstrated in his conciliar analysis that council’s purpose was chiefly to persuade others, or “to speak beyond the boundaries of Christian faith to the world”, rather than to declare doctrine.[4]
A great summary of its aims and the feelings of the time can be seen in Pope Paul VI’s address during the last general meeting of the council on December 7, 1965. When asking the assembled what the religious value of the council had been, he first hearkened back to the originator of the synod’s and his predecessor’s, John XXIII, words at the council’s opening that “the greatest concern of the ecumenical council is this: that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be guarded and taught more effectively…”, and then the concluding pontiff described clearly the reason for the council, highlighting the novel and disenchanted condition of the secular world, partially transcribed below because of its articulateness:[5]
“His [John XXIII’s] great purpose has now been achieved. To appreciate it properly it is necessary to remember the time in which it was realized: a time which everyone admits is orientated toward the conquest of the kingdom of earth rather than of that of heaven; a time in which forgetfulness of God has become habitual, and seems, quite wrongly, to be prompted by the progress of science; a time in which the fundamental act of the human person, more conscious now of himself and of his liberty, tends to pronounce in favor of his own absolute autonomy, in emancipation from every transcendent law; a time in which secularism seems the legitimate consequence of modern thought and the highest wisdom in the temporal ordering of society; a time, moreover, in which the soul of man has plumbed the depths of irrationality and desolation; a time, finally, which is characterized by upheavals and a hitherto unknown decline even in the great world religions.”
The Pope clearly defined the problem of the modern world for the Church and then explained in his address the council’s aim of studying the modern world: to better communicate with mankind in order to promote and defend its holy truth. He then moved to discuss the Church’s “relationship of union with God, but with man ˗ man as he really is today…”.[6] This here can be seen as a radically different element of the council that led to the lion’s share of the following reforms, tied closely to the campaign of Aggiornamento, or updating, of John XXIII, a term used euphemistically to mean the throwing open of the Church’s doors in a desire to dialogue with the outside world.[7] This was a council centered on worldly matters, and it was asking the question of just how worldly the Church intended to stoop while still remaining true to its heavenly self and not diluting its mission. Paul VI continued in his address by stating, “Secular humanism, revealing itself in its horrible anti-clerical reality has, in a certain sense, defied the council. The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who makes himself God”, and then offered an olive branch with, “But we call upon those who term themselves modern humanists, and who have renounced the transcendent value of the highest realities, to give the council credit at least for one quality and to recognize our own new type of humanism: we, too, in fact, we more than any others, honor mankind.” This is a fascinating statement in which the Church, pausing for a moment from the usual contemplation of the divine, lowered its head down to the world and offered it compliment, something more common in the early Church’s self-marketing, where early evangelists sought to convince obstinate pagans of the appeal of Christianity. Symbolism around this notion can be seen in the changes to the Liturgy of the Mass after the council, where priests performing Mass were encouraged to face the congregation, as thought to have been done in the early church, instead of perform the service ad orientem, or facing away from the people and toward the wall-altar and tabernacle.[8]
Paul VI explained further the work of the council and remained assertive in defending the teaching authority of the Church’s historic doctrinal claims. He stated that in its dialogue with modern man, “preserving its own authority and force; it has spoken with the accommodating friendly voice of pastoral charity; (…) but [it] has also sought to express itself in simple, up-to-date, conversational style, derived from actual experience and a cordial approach which make it more vital, attractive and persuasive; it has spoken to modern man as he is.”[9] He claimed that the Church, in undertaking this council, had not diverted itself from God to modern culture, but instead it had briefly directed itself to humanity. At this point, the Pope made his brief pitch of the Roman Catholic religion to humanity, stating that in conformance with the modern mind’s principle of assessing things based on usefulness, the Church is not without use, as, “the Catholic religion is for mankind. In a certain sense it is the life of mankind. (…) The Catholic religion is man's life because it determines life's nature and destiny; it gives life its real meaning, it establishes the supreme law of life and infuses it with that mysterious activity which we may say divinizes it.”[10] He argued quite theologically that, in the proper view of Christ, “our humanism becomes Christianity” and that “a knowledge of man is a prerequisite for a knowledge of God”, a final justification for the work of Vatican II.[11] In the above quotations, we can therefore see the aim of the council, what made it so different, and how its lead presiders justified it.
Despite many accusations of its surrender to the progressive zeitgeist, the pronouncements for the changes to the liturgy, made in the conciliar constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, do appear to remain very traditional and in-line with the “Tridentine” (Latin for Trent) guidelines of the 1545 Council of Trent, which has greatly defined how the Church has functioned since its meeting, such as the formalizing of the territorial parish conception of the Church under a hierarchy of bishops.[12] For example, while in an effort to encourage “fully conscious and active participation” in the liturgy, the document states, “The liturgy is made up of immutable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change. These not only may but ought to be changed with the passage of time if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become unsuited to it.”[13], it does also state that “steps should be taken so that faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them.”[14] It goes on to defend other specific Tridentine practices such as affirming that “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services”[15] and “In the Latin Church the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem, for it is the traditional musical instrument which adds a wonderful splendor to the Church’s ceremonies and powerfully lifts up man’s mind to God and to higher things.”[16]
In this constitution, the rationale behind the vulgarization of liturgy is made clear: “Since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended.”[17] The Church’s aim to better reach out to the rest of the world is also made clear:[18]
“The Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not implicate the faith or the good of the whole community; rather does she respect and foster the genius and talents of the various races and peoples. Anything in these peoples’ way of life which is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error she studies with sympathy and, if possible, preserves intact. Sometimes in fact she admits such things in to the liturgy itself, so long as they harmonize with its true and authentic spirit.”
It is apparent from these passages that the council did maintain the traditional Tridentine structure of the Church and was true to John XXIII’s and Paul VI’s aim of adapting practices to, in their view, improve outreach to and communication with the world.
With this context, the argument of the traditionalists can be better understood and appreciated. The following articulation of the thesis frequently offered by those convinced of a causal connection between the council and later decline is what I believe to be most charitable and least “strawman-esque”: the ecumenical, liturgical, and pastoral reforms of the time of the council undermined the identity, or “name-brand”, of the Catholic Church in an attempt to accommodate the loosely-defined zeitgeist of progressivism.[19] This damaged the brand by removing its alluring mystery and its claims to uniqueness, making it at once ordinary and also worldly, or better put, disenchanted. It also hurt its perceived consistency, something marketing experts today warn against.[20] Many also point to insufficient severity in addressing atheism’s follies and insufficient philosophical examination of the Church’s new endorsement of religious freedom, which can be construed to go against the infallible pronouncements by the Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII, leading to deeper issues and problematic conclusions.[21] In the wake of the council, many voices in the Church have spoken against perceived consequences of these reforms, notably recently the Cardinals Raymond Burke and Robert Sarah, and also the religious order of the conservative Society of St. Pius X, which left the Church formally in 1975, but has since to some extent been welcomed back.[22] Even now among Catholic youth, there has been a resurgence of interest in old rite liturgical practices like the Tridentine Latin Mass following Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, as seen in the 2019 National Catholic Youth Conference, where an entire large church was filled for the service, versus the use of a small conference room for the Mass in 2015.
In fact, dissent arose almost immediately after the council about how to advertise and implement the reforms. An interesting story to highlight in the wake of the council is that of the academic split among those who all had enthusiastically partaken in the council. The theologians Joseph Ratzinger (later to be Pope Benedict XVI), Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac would resign from the journal Concilium, which was founded after the council to keep alive “the spirit of Vatican II”, and go on to found a rival journal called Communio.[23] Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles explains that these two journals, even today, represent the two warring perspectives on how to view Vatican II. Ratzinger stated that there were three reasons why he and the two other prominent theologians split from the original journal, which still had figures like Hans Küng and Yves Calgar, an extremely influential council “lobbyist”, on its editorial board. One issue was that many of the board members of Concilium wanted to form an alternative Magisterium, or teaching authority of the Church, separate from the Pope and bishops and composed of theologians. The founders of Communio knew that the Church could not survive with rival teaching authorities, and that serious confusion would result if this plan came to fruition. The second reason was that many of these theologians were already eager for a “Vatican III”, where the agenda of liberal Catholicism could be further pursued. Ecumenical councils are rarely held, averaging one a century. Lastly, Ratzinger was wary of the purpose of Concilium magazine, which was to perpetuate the spirit of the council, and wished to remind all the faithful that the council, and its period of internal self-questioning and introspection, was now over and the time had come for the Church to return to its job of serving the world. If the Church began a sequence of constant reform and questioning of its fundamental assumptions, strong confusion and doubt would arise among its ranks and weaken the Church’s perceived validity. This was why, according to Ratzinger, councils historically were held so rarely, as during this time of questioning, the life of the Church is in suspense and those observing may see “all the rules up for grabs”.[24] Interestingly, another prominent dissenter of Concilium was the young and promising Karol Wojtyla, who would later become Pope St. John Paul the Great.
The fading environment that followed the bold and proactive-in-aspiration council does lead one to consider whether the council disrupted the flow of the Church’s operations and if the council stemmed the flood of modernity and its secular humanism among Catholics at all. The Pew Research Center reported this October (2019) that currently one-in-five adults within the U.S. identify as Catholics, down from 23% in 2009.[25] This is a less severe decline than that of Protestantism, which has sunk over the past decade from 51%, or a majority of the nation’s adult population, to 43%. The subset that saw the greatest growth has been what Pew terms the religious “nones”, those religiously unaffiliated, seeing swelling from 17% in 2009 to 26% today. Another Pew survey, done in 2015, found that of the 32% of Americans raised Catholic, only 21% remained so, a drop off over double the rate at which Americans left Protestantism. The survey also pointed out a sharp fall in church attendance, an ever-worsening trend since the 1960s, and that fewer young people now consider themselves Catholic.[26] The median age for U.S. Catholics is 49, versus 40 for members of other religions and 36 for the U.S. population. The survey reported less bleak numbers globally. Church membership has held steady at ~18% of the global population for decades, according to official Church data, with healthy growth in Africa compensating for decreases elsewhere.[27]
This commonly repeated and rehashed information however does not capture the entire perspective. In 2012, the church historian Wilhelm Damberg of Bochum stated that while church attendance numbers have decreased since the council, “it is also true that church attendance numbers going back to the 1920s reached their high point in 1935.”[28] The perceived-to-be-vibrant Catholic Church of the post-war era was a short and temporary high, with perhaps the war as its explanation, as “between 1950 and 1965 the proportion of church attendees among all Catholics sank from 50 percent to 45.”[29] There were pronounced problems before the council, for as far back as 1903, Pope Pius X deplored the state of participation, noting that the detached congregants did not follow along with the Latin Mass and would do their own prayers in parallel, step out to smoke, and often leave right after receiving the Host. In a 1960 survey of 9,000 youths, it was revealed that attending the Mass hardly had any emotional impact for them, and the historian Damberg aptly remarked that “if one thinks that people back then spent hours at Mass devoutly listening to Latin prayers and chants”, one would recalling things contrary to fact.[30] And so, it does appear that the more scholastically-oriented Tridentine Church had been having significant engagement issues well before the council. A convincing way to analyze the symptoms of secularization that the Church faced, and the Church’s failings to engage its members, is through the Institutional Competition Theory, also known as the “Supply-Side” theory, which argues that religious diversity increases religious participation and that religious institutions compete to fill religious demand within a greater “marketplace”.[31]
Melissa Wilde, a comparative-historical sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, did this in her study entitled “Who Wanted What and Why at the Second Vatican Council”, in which she analyzed the conflicting aims of the attending bishops from Western and Northern Europe, Latin America, and the “missionary countries” within Africa and Asia. To briefly explain a part of the theory, it is thought that diversity leads religious institutions to experience more competition, making them work harder to attract and retain members, “marketing” their religion more actively than would be done by religious institutions within monopolistic religious economies, who would be in some cases less “oriented toward change” and in worse cases “lazy”.[32] Wilde found this theory to generally hold, as the bishops from countries where the Roman Catholic Church was the predominant religion, such as Italy and Spain, were conservative stalwarts during the council, and the bishops attending from Latin America, where intensive competition with Evangelical missionaries and Marxists existed, were more progressive and ready to adapt parts of the liturgical and pastoral nature of the Church in order to grow in their regions. The Latin American bishop Leonidas Villalba Proano articulated this sentiment well: “We cannot stay put and closed but must go out to attract the masses to Christ. And this has to be done by sharing the beauty of Christian doctrine. Look at the attitude of the communists. They would even penetrate into our seminaries! (…) They would infiltrate everywhere.” This radical Latin American plan of spreading the faith would become known as the controversial Liberation Theology, aimed at ministering to unchurched populations and addressing social injustice as methods of gaining converts, and it would flourish after the council’s close.[33]
From what we have seen in the aims of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, it is sensible to state that some of the theory’s implied requirements of a religion in order to keep itself influential and relevant may well have been the aspirations of the council, but their carrying out has not been effective. A strong point is made by Bishop Robert Barron regarding the decline of Catholic church attendance and membership. Upon reviewing the results of a 2012 survey conducted by William J. Byron, S.J. and the professor Charles Zech, under the instigation of the Bishop of Trenton David O’Connell, which asked former Catholics simply why they had left the Church, Barron noted that even though many had left over predictable “hot-button” issues such as gay marriage, divorce and remarriage, contraception, and women’s ordination, a large number had left for reasons that were much more easily addressable and did not have to do with doctrinal reform.[34] He pointed out the category of “bad customer relations” undertaken by the Church, namely in the form of aloof and unrelatable priests, bad preaching, unfriendly lay parish staff, and the fact that most who stop attending Mass are not never contacted by the Church to ask where and why they have gone. He pondered on how multinational corporations could keep such good tabs on their millions of customers, but a parish serving a thousand families did not do the same.
While the traditionalist claim of a damaged/diluted name-brand carries some merit within a competitive marketplace, so does the fact that its marketers, down to the local sales representative that is the parish priest, could have done better to carry the brand. It appears that the last few decades, particularly in the context of the Church in the United States, have seen a disconnect between the apologetic plans of the council and the effectiveness of its ministers in carrying out the apology. This disconnect has allowed a void to open and be filled with other candidates, whether those be religions that better marketed themselves within religiously pluralistic settings, or filled with the surrogate(s) that modernity could provide in the form of entertainment media, scientific pursuits, secular humanism, or more likely a combination of these things. Accordingly, this paper would be lacking if it did not include a very poignant example of this failure in the field of apologetics undertaken by the Church in the years after the council. That failure was the events surrounding an encyclical written by Paul VI in 1968 entitled Humanae Vitae, which re-affirmed the Church’s teachings regarding conjugal love, responsible parenthood, and the prohibition of artificial contraception.
The political controversy was significant following this letter, as many saw the natural contraception methods endorsed by the Church, such as timing sex with a woman’s menstrual cycle, as nothing more than mere mental tricks still against the spirit of Church teaching, and many others were concerned that restricting the use of contraceptives could lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS. Many divorced and/or remarried Catholics, feeling as though they were being called out for “living in sin”, felt alienated by the Church. Amid this first major open dissent from the laity in the modern era, dissident theologians merged to side with them. For example, Reverend Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America issued a statement days after the encyclical stating, “spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the value and sacredness of marriage.”[35] During such a time of doctrinal tumult and regardless of which side of the debate argued the truth, the side of the official Church did not defend itself especially well and left many open wounds in its relationship with its members undressed. Troubled by the controversy over his encyclical in the West, Pope Paul VI replied merely, “May the lively debate aroused by our encyclical lead to a better knowledge of God’s will.”[36] Tellingly, after speaking with and listening to one of the critics of his encyclical in March of 1969, Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, Paul VI replied, “Yes, pray for me; because of my weaknesses, the Church is badly governed.”[37] Such divide amidst conflicting voices of authority hurt the Church’s image of consistency and left many members conflicted and uncertain, as was the fear of the Communio founders.
Much more discussion can be had about the Church’s poor job, particularly in the West, at apologetics, and efforts to improve the situation and make relatable apologetics training a requirement in Catholic education do exist, though with quite limited success when in view of the gloomy statistics earlier detailed. While there have also been small resurgences in traditional Catholicism among some youth members, as demonstrated in the sky-high attendances at Latin Masses throughout the U.S. and the success of some monastic cloisters, the Catholic Church, facing ever-increasing competition from other religions and, more prominently, secular sources in the modern age, has become a side-show in terms of its influence in the public square. The Vatican II council had attempted to prevent this from happening, and while it remained conservative in its approach to doctrine and a few liturgical practices, it certainly was a divisive liturgical and pastoral overhaul of the publicly-viewed “name-brand” of the Church and a change from its centuries-cemented consistency. The sidelining of the often cryptic-sounding Latin language and simplifying of many rituals removed some hallmark brand qualities of the Church. This disconnect between traditional doctrine and attempts at progressive outreach does appear to be a factor in the Church’s loss of relevance in a more competitive “marketplace”. However, Vatican II is not where it all went wrong, or some sort of secularizing ground zero, as there were traceable elements of disengagement and lack of lay enthusiasm from well before the council, during the times when the Church exerted much more influence and faced less competition.
The answer to the Church’s modern woes of lacking attendance, declining priesthood numbers in the West, growing disaffiliation, and varied scandals may just have something to do with the lack of a fight that it has put up in defending its tenets, maintaining its unique mystique, and retaining meaningful contact with its members. The monopoly seems to have become comfortable, and its muscles had atrophied just enough to weaken its ability to close the fissures of dissent and doubt as they opened. In a way, Paul VI, the closer of the council and writer of Humanae Vitae, acknowledged this sentiment when he remarked, nearing his death and pondering the internal and external divide that had sprung up from his last encyclical, that “the smoke of Satan entered the temple of God from some fissure”.[38] Thoughts contrary to the established religion of Roman Catholicism certainly entered and eventually dominated the public sphere, and the Church, through its day-to-day operations from the parish level to the official conciliar level, was not prepared to face them.
SOURCES:
[1] Abbot, Walter M. S.J. “The Documents of Vatican II, With Notes and Comments by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Authorities”. Guild Press. 4th Printing in 1966.
[2] O’Brien, George Dennis. “The Risks of History: Does the Church do Paradigm Shift?” Commonweal Magazine. April 16, 2019.
[3] Wilde, Melissa. “Who Wanted What and Why at the Second Vatican Council? Toward a General Theory of Religious Change”. Sociologica (ISSN 1971-8853), Fascicolo 1. May-June 2007. P.1
[4] O’Brien, George Dennis. “The Risks of History: Does the Church do Paradigm Shift?”
[5] “Address of Pope Paul VI During the Last General Meeting of the Second Vatican Council”. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651207_epilogo-concilio.html
[6] Ibid.
[7] Wikipedia article on Aggiornamento. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggiornamento
[8] Inter Oecumeninci, 91. https://adoremus.org/1964/09/26/inter-oecumenici/
[9] “Address of Pope Paul VI During the Last General Meeting of the Second Vatican Council”.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Faggioli, Massimo. “Trent’s Long Shadow”. Commonweal Magazine. August 23, 2018.
[13] Sacrosanctum Concilium, 21. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html
[14] Ibid., 54
[15] Ibid., 116
[16] Ibid., 120
[17] Ibid., 36.2
[18] Ibid.
[19] Odendahl, Björn. “Alternative Facts on Vatican II”. PrayTellBlog. March 18, 2017. https://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2017/03/18/alternative-facts-on-vatican-ii/
[20] Rotter, Steve. “Marketing Research: Why Having Consistent Content Is So Important”. Acrolinx. May 23, 2016.
https://www.acrolinx.com/blog/marketing-research-consistent-content-important/
[21] Baker, Michael. “Pope Francis and the Secularisation of the Church”. March 19, 2013. Superflumina.org. http://www.superflumina.org/pope_francis_secularisation_church.html
[22] Odendahl, Björn. “Alternative Facts on Vatican II”.
[23] Barron, Bishop Robert. “On the Meaning of Vatican II”. Word on Fire Lecture Series. June 27, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8j24FBRgrA&list=WL&index=52&t=0s
[24] Ibid.
[25] “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”. Pew Research Center. October 17, 2019. https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
[26] Britzky, Haley. “Catholic Church faces ominous decline”. Axios. August 25, 2018.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Odendahl, Björn. “Alternative Facts on Vatican II”
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Wilde, Melissa. “Who Wanted What and Why at the Second Vatican Council? Toward a General Theory of Religious Change”. P.13
[32] Ibid. P.15
[33] Ibid. P.17
[34] Barron, Bishop Robert. “Bishop Barron on Why Catholics Leave the Church”. Word on Fire Lecture Series. April 4, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dftZ5K_EA4s&list=WL&index=55&t=0s
[35] McCormick, Richard. “’Humanae Vitae’: 25 Years Later”. America Magazine. July 17, 1993.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Hebblethwaite, Peter. “Paul VI”. Paulist Press New York. 1993. P. 532
[38] Pope Paul VI. “Santa Messa per il IX anniversario dell'incoronazione di Sua Santità nella solennità dei Santi Apostoli Pietro e Paolo”. La Santa Sede. June 29, 1972. Translated from Italian. http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/it/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629.html