Posted by Few scholars have studied the extent, causes, and effects of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century collapse of Western Catholicism more carefully than French historian Guillaume Cuchet.
Anatomist of the Catholic collapse in France and beyond – Catholic World Report
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.1It 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”).
2) The discrepancy between “official Catholicism” after Vatican II and traditional popular piety. As an illustration of this factor, Cuchet notes that in shrines where this piety was respected, the collapse was far slower than in those in which new pastoral orientations were enforced (p. 148).7
3) In this connection, Cuchet (p. 149) points out that some elements of the liturgy, while seeming secondary to intellectuals, are actually psychological and anthropological determinants. He mentions the abandonment of Latin, changing pronouns to address God (“Thou” vs. “you” in the English context), Communion in the hand, the minimization or scuttling of former obligations (see below), and so forth.
4) An often forgotten principle of the new pastoral orientations is their high standard of expectation regarding the level of commitment of Catholics, starting already in 1960 and generalized by 1965. Access to baptism for one’s children required not only the promise to have one’s child catechized (which was already the case), but also now a “preparation” of several months for the parents to undergo. If the pastor deemed the parents insufficiently committed, he might postpone the baptism—a reversal of the pre-conciliar urgency to baptize children as soon as possible. Matrimony in Church went from a sociological convention to a personal investment and a public declaration of faith from which many, for diverse reasons, shrank (sense of propriety, discretion, simple shyness . . .).
5) As concerns doctrine and changes in catechesis, Cuchet invokes a principle that nineteenth-century philosopher Théodore Jouffroy articulated: changes in official teaching turn humble folk into skeptics. Indeed, an institution that admits to having been wrong yesterday may well be wrong today, too.8 In this respect, Cuchet focuses on the sudden silence in the pulpits (as tracked in parish bulletins giving the topic of the homily) regarding the four last things (Judgment, Purgatory, Heaven, Hell); it gave the impression that the clergy had either ceased to believe in them or no longer knew how to discuss them, even though these had been frequent sermon topics right up until the Council; historian Jean Delumeau spoke of a pre-conciliar “pastoral strategy of fear.”9
6) More fundamentally, Cuchet speaks of “a collective exit from the culture of obligatory practice under pain of mortal sin.” This practice was articulated in the list of obligations generally taught as “Commandments of the Church”: holy days “of obligation”; Sunday Mass; Confession of Sins; Easter Communion; Fasting (Ember Days, Vigils, Lent); abstinence (all Fridays and some other days). While these obligations were at most softened (days of abstinence and fasting) but never suspended in the official texts, they were seldom mentioned any more. The gradual shrinking of the Eucharistic fast (traditionally no food or drink of any kind from midnight to Communion), begun by Pius XII in 1953 (water no longer broke it), led to its virtual extinction by Paul VI (the “one hour before Communion” Eucharistic fast) (p. 153). These modifications entailed social changes as well: anecdotally, Boulard noted the adverse affect that the end of Friday abstinence had on the fish markets of France. The permission to anticipate Sunday by attending Mass on Saturday evenings participated in the desacralization of Sundays, whose focus now shifted to leisure (which the now widespread ownership of television sets and automobiles made that much more available). As an aside, Cuchet mentions that at the time, the clergy viewed these effects in a positive light: a pastor could now be sure that those Catholics who still went to Sunday Mass or did penance on Fridays did so “more freely and more consciously” (p. 155).
7) Lastly, a decision was made that let out of the churches their most teachable demographic: children. Under the former catechetical system, 80% of French children attended Mass every Sunday (with or without their parents) in preparation for their “Solemn First Communion,” a rite of passage complete with a fancy lunch at the restaurant and gifts from relatives. Whole classes, arrayed in little wedding dresses and dark suits (festooned with white fringed satin arm band and mother-of-pearl crucifix boutonniere), went through it at the age of twelve. Weekly attendance at Mass and monthly Confession were required to be admitted to this socially resonant rite, after which young people tended to replicate their parent’s attendance rates. By 1965, however, this system was judged to be “merely social” and hypocritical and was withdrawn along with its incentives, significantly raising the median aged of the average congregation. Retired priests of the conciliar generation have confided to Cuchet that they felt liberated from such a burden as hearing confessions, particularly children’s confessions, every Saturday—a burden termed “chronophagous,” a “time-eater.” Other factors may have played a role in the loss of the church-attending hordes of children too, including the length of obligatory schooling, which gave the public school system a longer time in which to intervene between family tradition and the child.
Such, in broad strokes, are the results of Cuchet’s careful analysis of and reflection on the data surrounding the unprecedented downturn in the graph tracking measurable religious practice among Catholics in France. There is no denying that, despite the author’s charitable tone, it does amount to an indictment of the clergy (bishops and priests alike) on whom the responsibility of implementing the Council fell. Retrospectively, one wishes the priests had left well enough alone.
What emerges most forcefully—and what the author goes on to explore in his more reflective and prospective book Does Catholicism Still Have a Future in France?10—is the necessarily sociological dimension of religion. A whole complex of shared values, to some extent held together by a system of obligations indexed on a strong sense of the connection between religious practice and one’s eternal destiny, and incarnated in seasonal practices (recurring feasts and fasts, rites of passage), was the body of Catholicism, while the soul in this analogy was actual personal assent to the truths taught and, in fine, commitment to Christ. Many of what Cuchet calls the clergy’s “false good pastoral ideas” (i.e. good intentions with disastrous results) derive from the Platonic notion that separating the soul from the body would be to the former’s benefit. Instead, of course, death ensued, and our world stopped being Christian.
It is most interesting to compare similar works in other countries—not least our own—and see whether the local situation, with its own particularities (the Church in the US did not have Solemn First Communion, nor was it ever the ultramajority), reflects the same statistical drop-off, and at what date (was it also 1965?); as it is, Cuchet’s work may be too narrowly focused on France alone. But this work, in tandem with the statistical analyses of Stephen Bullivant’s Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (Oxford, 2019) and, for religious life, Fr. Joseph Becker’s significant The Re-Formed Jesuits: A History of Changes in Jesuit Formation During the Decade 1965-1975 (Ignatius, 1992),11 may help to pinpoint and, perhaps, avoid repeating the causes of the major civilizational change of our lifetime.
Endnotes:
1 Guillaume Cuchet, Comment notre monde a cessé d’être chrétien. Anatomie d’un effondrement (Paris: Éditions Points, 2020).
2 From the Académie des Inscriptions et belles lettres and from the Centre national du livre.
3 Fernand Boulard and Gabriel LeBras, Carte religieuse de la France rurale (Paris: Cahiers du Clergé rural, 1952); Id. et al., Matériaux pour l’histoire religieuse du peuple français, XIXe-XXe siècles, 4 vols, (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1982-2011).
4 H. Godin and Y. Daniel, La France, pays de mission? (Paris: Cerf, 1943).
5 Cuchet, Comment, 98. “Sanctuarisation” is a French neologism on Cuchet’s part indicating that Vatican II as an event is a sort of Holy of Holies for the generation that lived it.
6 “D’où cette rupture, puisque rupture il y a eu, a-t-elle donc bien pu venir? Il faut qu’il y ait eu un événement derrière un phénomène de cet ordre, au moins pour le provoquer. Mon hypothèse est qu’il s’agit du concile Vatican II.”
7 Quoting Fernand Boulard, “La Religion populaire dans le débat de la pastorale contemporaine,” in B. Plongeron ed., La Religion populaire. Approches historiques (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976), 27-49.
8 Comment, 149, referring to T. Jouffroy, “Sur le scepticisme de notre époque,” in id., Cours du droit naturel, professé à la Faculté des lettres de Paris (Paris: Prévost-Crocius, 1834), 1-7.
9 J. Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture (New York: MacMillan, 1990).
10 Guillaume Cuchet, Le Catholicisme a-t-il encore de l’avenir en France? (Paris: Seuil, 2021).
11 Not to forget, on the order of anthropological principles, Mary Douglas’s classic Purity and Danger (Routledge, 1966) and Natural Symbols (Barrie and Rockliff, 1970).