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The historical criticism that Christianity was subjected to in the early 20th century is just now being utilized on Islam. Here's a video on some of their recent discoveries:
And here's an article on the collapse of Catholicism in France:
And here's an article on the collapse of Catholicism in France:
Catholic practice collapsed in the West in the 1960s: the statistics are overwhelming
France, the eldest daughter of the Church, went from 25% Sunday Mass attendance in the 1950s to less than 2% now; the collapse includes regions where weekly Sunday Mass attendance had reached 97% in the late 1950s (this applies also to Belgium, Québec, etc.). The qualitative argument “but they’re better Catholics now!”—a subjective assessment amounting to soul-reading that never did, on the whole, convince—is seldom heard anymore.
This is a catastrophe which, for having occasioned an abundant but too seldom rigorous literature, remains unsatisfactorily addressed or explained. One used to hear that it would be for twenty-first-century historians to sort out the extent, causes, and effects of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century collapse of Western Catholicism.
They have begun to do so, and none more carefully, soberly, and instructively than French historian Guillaume Cuchet (1973-), professor of history at the University of Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. The title of his principal work on the subject is blunt: How Our World Stopped Being Christian: Anatomy of a Collapse.1 It is heavy on facts and figures (including statistical maps) and shuns frivolous speculation; for this reason, it has received a couple of prestigious book awards from the French State.2 This book, and indeed the rest of Cuchet’s production, contributes to our understanding of what happened while proceeding carefully and avoiding polemics.
As it does not yet exist in English, we here present its salient discoveries and analyses.
The first fact that Cuchet brings out—relying on the excellent pre-conciliar sociological work of Canon Fernand Boulard and others3—is the surprising vigor of French Catholicism from the 1930s to the early 1960s, when it could be said that in France, Catholics made up the “ultramajority” (p. 56): from a survey conducted in 1872 to Boulard’s investigations in the early 1960s, 98% of French responders declared themselves to be “Roman Catholic.” True, some areas were void of actual Sunday Mass attendance (the very regions whose clergy had rallied to the French Revolution in the 1790s, which were the same regions, it turns out, that had been sluggish in implementing . . . Trent!) while in others, all but the canonically impeded were at Mass every Sunday of the year (the Vendée, Flanders . . .). 94% of French children were baptized Catholic within three months of birth (as opposed to 30% within seven years today). Boulard’s work, summarized in a famous map of Catholic practice, was on the whole reassuring to an episcopate that had been worried by a 1943 book asking whether France might not be mission territory (it is still invoked to claim that all was not well in the 1940s and 50s).4 Indeed, during those decades, fully three quarters of missionaries overseas were French priests and religious of both sexes.
Next, Cuchet explodes a couple of myths regarding the timing of the collapse. Conventional Catholic historiography dated the “before and after” event to 1968. Conservatives saw in that year a generalized breakdown in traditional society (the famous “May 1968” strikes among workers and students) that affected the patriarchal structure of the family, respect for authority generally, and religion specifically. Progressive Catholics blamed the slowing down or even reversal of necessary Vatican II reforms; from this point of view, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae excluding the morality of contraception betrayed the Council, dashed the hopes of ordinary Catholics, and helped empty the churches.
Cuchet, once again relying on the late-1960s work of Canon Boulard and others, shows that the collapse of practice among Catholics in France dates to three years before 1968, very precisely to the year 1965. He calls it “the year of the drop-off (décrochage)” or “of the collapse (effondrement).” As Cuchet points out, this reality puzzled Boulard and the bishops he reported to at a time of “ideological sanctuarization of the Second Vatican Council,”5 although by then the bishops, who could (unconsciously?) sense that certain hopes had been misplaced, were no longer interested in such quantitative studies. In fact, Boulard continued his research at the university and carried on until his death in 1977. Cuchet had access to some of his correpondence and interlocutors from the period 1965-1977; after a time, it did dawn on Boulard that something drastic had happened.
Cuchet shows that 1965 is not only the year of the collapse in terms of Mass attendance but also—and sometimes even more dramatically—in terms of confession (now “Reconciliation”), baptism, and extreme unction (now “Anointing of the Sick”). The figures he marshals are starkly irrefutable.
The question Cuchet, a professional historian, had to broach was that of causes. His reluctance to tread onto the minefield is palpable. Although the trend over several centuries had been a slow decline of Catholicism, with a few dips (French Revolution) and peaks (in the nineteenth century—think of the Curé of Ars and Saint Thérèse—and after each of the World Wars), the collapse of 1965 is as steep and sudden as it was completely unexpected by anyone at the time, Boulard being the first among those startled at so uncharacteristic an inflexion in the graphs he had been drawing for a generation. Why did it happen at this time?
Cuchet cautiously ventures the following (p. 144): “Where can this rupture, since rupture there was, possibly have come from? There must have been an event behind a phenomenon of this magnitude, at least to provoke it. My hypothesis is that it was the Second Vatican Council.”6 He does hedge by claiming that a priori the texts of the Council had little to do with the collapse, while granting that, perhaps, certain aspects of the liturgical reform or of the text on religious liberty might have contributed. But certainly, he adds, the text on liturgical reform did not minimize the importance of Sunday liturgy—quite the contrary!
Here are the causes he invokes, in outline:
1) The teaching of the council on religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae (December 1965). The application of religious liberty could hardly concern society at large, since such a liberty had existed in the West for nearly two centuries. It was therefore applied ad intra as freedom of conscience to the manner in which Catholics approached their own religious obligations (pp. 146-147). This amounted to a permission for Catholics to make up their own minds regarding doctrine and discipline (today we would speak of “cafeteria Catholicism”).
