Over the last year, I’ve been building an expanded data set off of the excellently detailed, but annoyingly short-term Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA)/Georgetown University data on Catholicism in the United States in an attempt to inject more factual analysis into the endless arguments about whether Vatican II caused, contributed to, or curbed the crisis of decline seen in the Catholic Church over the last sixty years.
Because the CARA data only goes back to 1970, it shows general decline across most metrics since the Council. It is very helpful for showing what has changed in the last 60 years. But since it doesn’t show where the Church in the United States was trending both before and after the Council, it’s extremely unhelpful for use in polemics on what the actual cause of this decline was.
Traditionalists looking at the steep decline after 1965 blame the Council, while defenders of the Council blame the decline on the culture, Humane Vitae, or pretend there isn’t a crisis.
A new, much-discussed, and well-researched piece by Andrew Warfield, We Must Build: Recovering Catholic Geography, has entered this debate, admitting decline, admitting that Vatican II accelerated that decline, but claiming that the real cause of the decline of the Church is suburbanization and the destruction of geographically dense integrated Catholic communities. As the previous “Catholic ghetto”, dense Catholic clusters around parishes with thousands of practicing Catholics within a short walk, got replaced by far-flung suburbs and distant parishes, Warfield argues, embodied liturgical and paraliturgical, or Catholicism-suffused cultural practice was disrupted. Commuting to a newly built distant parish in a more thinly populated suburb with few Catholics around you changed the nature of faith from a lived practice in response to an obvious reality to a fragile, individual interior choice that, for many Catholics at least, can’t survive for long in the cross pressures of dissipated modernity. Decline, Warfield contends, in Catholicism in Quebec and Ireland correlates with their delayed suburbanization and experience of the deepest throes of cultural modernity compared to the rest of Europe and the United States, supporting his position for the primacy of the cultural argument for Catholic decline.
Continue reading at Grain of Wheat