Data supports notion regarding dwindling Catholic Mass participation

In the early 1960s, Catholic leaders from various nations convened to revise Church teachings for a contemporary context. Changes instituted by the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly termed Vatican II, aimed to create more inclusive worship communities. The most notable reform allowed priests to conduct Mass in languages beyond Latin.

Scholars and some Church insiders have long asserted that Vatican II had unintended consequences, potentially leading to a global downturn in Mass attendance. Now, an economics working paper has reinforced that argument with fresh statistical insights.

“From 1965 to 2010, we observe a notable global decline in Catholic involvement in formal services,” stated co-author Robert J. Barro, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics. “It accumulates to approximately 20 percentage points.”

The results were achievable due to a groundbreaking dataset sourced from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). By extracting responses to inquiries regarding religious service attendance during childhood, Barro and his team have assembled the first dependable information on enduring trends in 66 nations. In certain regions, the data extends back to the 1920s.

Consequently, this project significantly enhances understanding of varying trends of religious service attendance globally. Furthermore, it employs an “event study” framework to investigate two critical historical periods: Vatican II and the late 1980s/early ’90s disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe.

“This paper is a plea for action, urging awareness about this remarkable wealth of data that has yet to be utilized,” expressed co-author Laurence R. Iannaccone, an economics professor at Chapman University. “It can aid in reconstructing church participation rates across numerous nations — and we ought to examine it meticulously.”

This innovative statistical approach owes its origins to the late Andrew Greeley, a priest and successful romance novelist who earned a sociology Ph.D. in 1962. During his tenure at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, Greeley dedicated years to the nationally representative General Social Survey. According to Iannaccone, who respected Greeley, the unconventional scholar finally persuaded the center to include questions regarding childhood service attendance. They also inquired how often parents had attended when respondents were young.

At Greeley’s suggestion, comparable language was incorporated into the internationally representative ISSP in 1991. Iannaccone, who heads Chapman’s Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society, was the first to highlight the significance of these retrospective inquiries in an unpublished paper from 2003.

“I thought, hold on — this resembles a call across time,” reminisced Iannaccone, who suspected that individuals in oppressive regimes would be more inclined to respond truthfully about the past.

Barro, co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, was impressed by Iannaccone’s proposal and motivated him to get his manuscript ready for review. However, life became demanding, the Chapman professor noted, and he never realized that plan. Eventually, Barro recruited former Harvard research fellow Edgard Dewitte to aid in finalizing the analysis using new ISSP data.

The trio of co-authors sifted through over 200,000 responses spanning six continents from surveys conducted in 1991, 1998, 2008, and 2018. “Thus, an 80-year-old who participated in the 1998 survey could trace their responses back to the 1920s or 1930s,” Barro elucidated.

A series of validations ensured the data’s dependability. Initially, the researchers could compare all four sets of ISSP outcomes for a given year. “You might assume that memory deteriorates over time,” Barro, a macroeconomist who frequently investigates religion in collaboration with his spouse, economics lecturer Rachel M. McCleary, explained. “Nevertheless, we discovered it was strikingly stable.”

The data also verified against contemporaneous results from more focused surveys. Greeley himself co-authored a 1987 paper that referenced Gallup poll findings indicating declining attendance in U.S. churches. Retrospective data from the ISSP also aligned with four decades of World Values Survey results from 48 nations.

No quantitative assessment could definitively articulate why Vatican II was so estranging. Critics have claimed that it weakened the Church’s hierarchy and facilitated a rift between reform advocates and traditionalists. Greeley himself attributed the disconnect to Pope Paul VI rejecting a special commission’s recommendations.

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suggestion to ease the Church’s position on contraception. “It was this progression, more than any other, that disrupted the power structure,” he noted in 1998.

However, the economists can verify that this phenomenon was particular to Catholicism. They accomplished this by contrasting traditionally Catholic nations — where over half the populace aligned with the faith in 1900 — to other nations in the dataset, including Christian ones predominantly associated with Protestant or Orthodox beliefs. They also examined individuals with Catholic and non-Catholic parents.

Global monthly religious service attendance rates

The trendlines reveal nothing significant before 1965, when the modifications of Vatican II were publicized. However, a drastic decrease in monthly service attendance becomes apparent among Catholics and in Catholic-majority nations like Ireland, Italy, and Spain. Additional occurrences, including a string of sexual abuse scandals, likely played a role in the prolonged impact observed by researchers in following decades.

“In a way, the outcomes merely reinforce what people have been asserting for a lengthy period,” Iannaccone commented. “We can now observe, across a wide variety of nations, that Vatican II had the enduring consequence of significantly lowering church attendance rates.”

A less startling revelation pertains to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies, all of whom were antagonistic towards public worship. The data provided no indication of revived attendance as these communist regimes began to collapse in 1989.

“We were quite astonished by our findings there,” Barro stated. “We had subscribed to the belief that the conclusion of communism would stimulate a religious resurgence.”

The dataset also assisted in quantifying what the co-authors refer to as “the significant religious divergence.” The Global North and Global South resembled each other statistically in 1950, with an average monthly participation rate around 55 percent. By 2010, rates had dropped to 28 percent in the northern hemisphere, while numbers remained stagnant across various under-researched countries in Africa and Latin America.

Iannaccone aspires that this research motivates a fresh generation to engage in population surveys.

“By incorporating just a few additional questions, we can uncover not only what is currently occurring in Portugal or Armenia or the Baltic states,” he remarked. “We can gain insights into historical events, perhaps even in regions like China where … the government hesitates to inquire and the populace is even more reluctant to respond.”

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