"In the early 1960s, Catholic bishops from around the world met to update Church doctrine for a new era. Reforms made by the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, also known as Vatican II, were meant to foster more inclusive congregations. The most famous allowed priests to celebrate Mass in languages other than Latin. Academics and certain Church insiders have long contended that Vatican II backfired and instead triggered a worldwide decline in Mass attendance."
"The findings were made possible by an innovative new dataset, mined from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). By pulling answers to survey questions about religious service attendance in childhood, Barro and his collaborators have compiled the first reliable information on long-running trends in 66 countries. For some places, the numbers stretch as far back as the 1920s. As a result, the project substantially extends knowledge about fluctuating patterns of religious service attendance worldwide."
Vatican II introduced reforms in the early 1960s intended to make Catholic congregations more inclusive, including allowing Mass in vernacular languages. Many academics and church insiders contend those reforms contributed to a worldwide decline in Mass attendance. Researchers assembled a novel dataset from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), using recalled childhood service attendance to reconstruct long-term trends across 66 countries, with some series extending to the 1920s. An event-study design examines both Vatican II and the late 1980s/early 1990s collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The analysis estimates Catholic participation in formal services fell about 20 percentage points between 1965 and 2010.
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