The Data Is In! Vatican II Devastated the Church
A Harvard economist and a Catholic layman both prove what NeoCatholic Popesplainers disingenuously told us was a “logical fallacy.”
Every time a traditional Catholic points out the correlation between Vatican II and the catastrophic collapse of the Church, some smirking Novus Ordo apologist jumps in with a smug little Latin phrase: post hoc ergo propter hoc.
After this, therefore because of this.
“Just because Vatican II happened and then the Church collapsed,” they say, “doesn’t mean Vatican II caused the collapse. Correlation is not causation!”
Well, no. Correlation isn’t always causation. But sometimes? It is. That’s literally how evidence works. You observe cause and effect, test for confounding variables, rule out alternatives, and reach a conclusion. And that’s exactly what two very different studies, one from Harvard economists in 2025, and one from a Catholic layman in 2003, have done.
Together, they confirm what anyone with eyes to see already knows: Vatican II didn’t “renew” the Church. It decimated it. And the collapse wasn’t accidental. It followed directly from the very reforms the Council enacted.
Let’s walk through the proof.
The Harvard Study: Vatican II Caused a Global Catholic Collapse
In July 2025, three economists, Robert Barro (Harvard), Edgard Dewitte (Oxford), and Laurence Iannaccone (Chapman), published a monumental working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries.”
Using retrospective survey data from over 200,000 people across four decades, they reconstructed religious attendance rates going back to the 1920s in 66 countries. It is the most ambitious dataset on religious behavior ever created.
And what did they find?
“Vatican II, in 1962–1965, triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations.”
Yes, you read that right. Not “correlated with.” Not “followed by.” Triggered.
The economists applied an event-study design, a method used in economics to test the causal effects of discrete historical events, and confirmed that religious attendance in Catholic countries plummeted after Vatican II, while Protestant and Orthodox countries did not show the same pattern. Nor did Communist suppression have the same global effect. In fact, religious practice in some post-Communist countries rebounded.
But Vatican II? It was uniquely destructive.
Barro et al. write:
“Rates of religious-service attendance in predominantly Catholic countries started to decrease relative to those of all other countries and to those of other Christian countries precisely in the aftermath of Vatican II… The Catholic relative attendance rate fell by four percentage points per decade between 1965 and 2015.”
In other words, they ruled out “post hoc ergo propter hoc.” They showed that Catholic decline wasn’t part of a general secularization trend. It was uniquely Catholic. It began right after Vatican II. And it didn’t stop.
They even considered other historical shocks, like the collapse of Communism and the effects of war or depression, and found none had such a consistent, negative impact on religious practice as Vatican II did.
The Layman’s Indictment: A Church in Freefall
In 2003, Catholic author Kenneth C. Jones published The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators, collecting decades of raw Church statistics. In a devastating section titled “Vatican II Renewal: Myth or Reality?” he demolishes the lie that the Church was in crisis before the Council or that Vatican II sparked any sort of authentic renewal.
Here are the facts Jones assembled:
In 1960, the U.S. Church had:
53,796 priests
39,896 seminarians
168,527 nuns
9,897 parochial schools
4.2 million Catholic school students
1.3 million infant baptisms
146,212 adult baptisms
It was the largest, most robust Catholic system in the world. And it was growing. Between 1955 and 1960, the number of priests increased by 7,000. New seminaries were being built to meet demand.
And then came the Council.
By 2002:
Priests had dropped to 45,000
Seminarians: 4,700 (a 90% collapse)
Nuns: 75,000 (average age 68)
Mass attendance: down from 75% to 25%
Religious orders: in terminal decline
Annulments skyrocketed from 338 in 1968 to 50,000 in 2002
70% of young Catholics denied the Real Presence
And the trend has not reversed. Jones cited Ratzinger’s 1984 admission that Vatican II’s effects were not what anyone hoped:
“Expected was a new Catholic unity… instead we have been exposed to dissension… Expected was a great step forward; instead… a progressive process of decadence… The net result therefore seems negative.”
Even Ratzinger called it. And yet the myth persists.
The Stupidest Argument in Catholic History
There are people who look at all of this, statistical collapse in every measurable category of Catholic life, and say, “But that doesn’t mean Vatican II caused it.”
They will actually admit that the seminaries emptied, the convents died, the Mass was abandoned, the catechism vanished, the faith was lost, but Vatican II wasn’t the cause.
Why not?
Because saying so would make you guilty of the “post hoc” fallacy.
Except it’s not a fallacy when the event is temporally proximate, globally consistent, uniquely Catholic in its devastation, and empirically verified using control groups. That’s called a causal link.
And let’s be honest, if any other event had preceded such a collapse (say, a papal bull banning the Novus Ordo, or a global declaration of sedevacantism), these same people would have no problem assigning blame.
The “post hoc” canard is not a serious argument. It’s a defense mechanism for those who cannot emotionally bear the possibility that Vatican II was not just a mistake, but a catastrophe.
When the Wreckage Is That Obvious…
You don’t need a PhD in economics to read the signs of the times. But now, thanks to Barro and Iannaccone, even the data confirms what tradition has always known: the Council did not renew the Church. It gutted it.
There was no “new Pentecost.” There was no “springtime.” There was only the worst collapse of faith in Church history.
The rot didn’t begin after the Council. The rot was the Council.
Post Script: Advice From Kenneth C. Jones
Thank you for this article and data.
I asked this question during my conversion “infancy” in 2004 in Tallahassee, when my priest asked me to take the awful RCIA newcomers class, after he had so kindly received me in the Church. I had not yet reverted to Tradition, but I had asked Monsignor about the TLM. “You do not need to worry about that yet,” he said. In fact, he was of the age where he had celebrated the TLM.
I mentioned the crisis in the Church at the class. I was told by lay people, in very emphatic terms, that correlation did not equal causation, and that the decline was the fault of the 1960’s. (I was suspected of being conservative.)
But as a learned Traditional priest in Jacksonville, who has written on this extensively, later noted, “every Churchman at Vatican II celebrated the TLM.”
Perhaps the Counvil’s devastation was intended and desired, it seems to me now.
No matter how heretical the proclamations from Rome, no matter how many abuses occur in the liturgy, my politically “conservative” friends will not abandon the Novus Ordo new religion. No amount of argument or evidence persuades them. (This is not meant to criticize them personally.)
So again, perhaps the spiritual carnage was intended, and the American faithful wanted a new religion of women “Eucharistic ministers”, Ecumenism, and Hell-absent sermons. The lie that 1950’s America was somehow devoted to conserving the Faith and the Truth had been exposed. Otherwise, American Catholics would have revolted.
But they did not.
The new easy and democratic religion is just to their liking, apparently.
The cause goes far beyond the Council, I respectfully submit. We can thank Luther’s revolt, (now welcomed by every Vatican II pope), the French Revolution, the “Enlightenment”, the Masonic movement, as well as the Council.
England never rejected the Protestant Revolution. Now look at that Godforsaken country. And France. And Germany. And at our own country.
God is not mocked. He will repay. I pray we reject the Council and all revolutions against His Authority, before He does.
Liberalism in all its forms is a sin. We have no choice.
Amen. Thank you for just telling the bare honest truth Chris. May we get some Bishops and someday a Pope who will also tell the bare honest truth.