Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II
By Stephen Bullivant. Oxford University Press. 2020. 336 pages.

“The man who marries the spirit of the age will very soon find himself a widower.” G.K. Chesterton

Professor Stephen Bullivant is a prolific scholar with doctorates in theology and sociology. His forensic work of sociological data-gathering and analysis, Mass Exodus, can be overwhelming for the general reader in some ways. Its essential thrust is to caution against the temptation to draw easy conclusions, such as attributing declining church attendance to its most proximate cause, or mistaking causation for correlation. B may follow A, but may not necessarily be a consequence of A or only partially so. Both A and B are the result of many other factors, historic and contingent.

In other words, things unfold as they do for a complexity of reasons. It was Tolstoy who first warned chroniclers of history against the temptation to join dots neatly to form satisfying, closed theories. History is a continuum that we tend to break into increments for narrative coherence, but its starting points are arbitrary. This is a useful caveat to bear in mind when discussing the collapse of religious observance as much as anything else.

Tracing decline in attendance to the church’s over-readiness to comply with lockdowns during the COVID pandemic is not meaningless, but it is important to remember that this is part of a broader, ongoing pattern. Much has been written about the counter-witness of locked churches at a time when people needed the comfort of prayer and a place to find spiritual solace, where the sense of aloneness and isolation could be dissipated in the presence of the Lord of all.

Recent articles by British journalists writing about the Anglican church make similar observations, deploring the lockdown messaging of telling people they could “pray just as well at home on their sofas” as they tuned into services. Despite Pope Francis’ emphatic statement that remote or virtual participation could never be equated with personal attendance and engagement, there is little doubt that Catholics, like other Christians, have been affected by a new sense of opt-in observance.

Complexities

But as Bullivant would have surely noted, if his book were to be written a few years later, there is always a bigger picture, and one can usually find positive effects among the negative. One could argue, for instance, that Mass viewed by a single family member could, at some point, gain the attention of the rest of the household.

Also, people “shopped around” for good quality liturgy and homilies during the lockdown, and visited some beautiful places of worship, gaining spiritually and deepening their appreciation of the universal church, its diversity within unity. Many people who tuned into Mass from monastic communities were drawn to return and hear those same communities pray the divine office later in the day.

So trends in religious observance, when examined more closely, can’t be explained as summarily one may initially think. An example Bullivant cites early in his book is the assertion that Humanae Vitae was responsible for the lapsing and disaffiliation of many Catholics post-1968. He observes that other Christian churches with liberal teaching declined even more in the same period. He also points out that many Catholic couples had been living with the contradiction between their behaviour and the Church’s teaching before Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae without any public controversy.

When the issue is closely probed, Bullivant finds that the crisis was triggered by the undermining of the Church’s authority rather than the encyclical per se as many theologians, priests, and even bishops loudly challenged the Pope. Bullivant points out that in a single parish, even “in the same confessional,” people could receive very different counsel from different priests.

In wider society, many other things were changing too, bringing their own influences to bear on how Catholics practised their faith. Bullivant lists factors such as expanding access to education with a secular ethos, prosperity, and of course, in time, the shameful story of sex scandals and their cover-up.

A recent article in America magazine looks at declining religious practice among Generation X (people in their forties and fifties) since the lockdowns, and finds they are becoming less and less distinguishable from Millennials. Alongside the effect of the lockdowns, the writer ascribes the same general factors cited by Bullivant, with the important rider that the decision to skip Sunday Mass may not be ideological at all, but simply because “life gets in the way.”

There is simply far more going on, far more choice about how we spend our weekends, far more money to pay for it all, and far more pressure from children to be taken to sporting events or parties when the parish is celebrating Sunday Mass. A lot of the self-justifying “reasons” people advance for dropping out of church may be closer to excuses, according to the author of the America article.