Data Show: Vatican II Triggered Decline in Catholic Practice, by Phil Lawler

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture, Jul 28, 2025

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

(h/t to Rorate Caeli for calling attention to the NBER study.)

Throughout the Western world, Catholic Mass attendance has declined dramatically since Vatican II. That is an established fact. But did the Council—or its aftermath—cause the decline, or was the decline part of an overall cultural trend that the Council could not reverse? That question has prompted lively debate for several decades.

In an interesting new contribution to that debate, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that Vatican II was the cause of the decline. An NBER “working paper, Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 countries, reports that: “Vatican II, in 1962-1965, triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations.”

Notice the last clause of that sentence. After an exhaustive evaluation of the available date, the NBER dismisses the notion that a worldwide secularizing trend hit all religious institutions more or less equally. Not so, the working paper finds. The decline was particularly acute in Catholic countries; secularization hit Catholics harder than other religious groups. ….

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