BOOKS
Crucial to survival Joseph Shaw reviews three books on Catholic Faith and Catholic identity
Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II by Stephen Bullivant. Oxford, 2019; 302pp; £25 Why Catholics Leave, What They Miss, and How They Might Return by Bullivant, Knowles, Vaughan-Spruce, and Catherine Knowles. Paulist Press, 2019; 148pp; £15.99
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hat can sociology tell us about why the Catholic Church has declined, in numerical terms, since Vatican II, and the place of the Traditional Mass in responding to the crisis? Professor Stephen Bullivant, a Catholic theologian and sociologist of religion, and occasional Traditional Mass attender, does an excellent job of telling us in these two books. The second, and shorter, of the two books is the analysis of an unusual survey undertaken in 2015 for the Diocese of Portsmouth, which asked self-identified lapsed Catholics (ie baptized but nonpracticing) why they left. The first, and longer, book uses the Portsmouth data, and other sources, for a comprehensive sociological analysis of what has gone wrong in Britain and America.
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The central thesis relates to the changing nature of the Catholic community in both countries. According to the sociological theory of ‘social network effects’, a religion (or any other world view) is less likely to lose its adherents insofar as those holding it are part of a tightly-knit community. A great many of our Catholic predecessors of fifty and more years ago were members of such communities: they read Catholic papers, their friends tended to be Catholic, they met fellow parishioners in the street and where they spent their leisure time; they married other Catholics and sent their children to Catholic schools. This community had a ‘wall’ around it, so to speak, as Catholics actively sought out the company of their fellows, had much in common with them, and could recognize them in all sorts of ways. There were ‘markers’ of Catholic identity, such as the keeping of feast and fast days, eating fish on Fridays, and the like, and Catholic worship and devotions were very distinct from those of other denominations (High Anglican imitations notwithstanding). In the context of such communities, another sociological phenomenon can flourish: the ‘Credulity Reinforcing Expression of Belief’, or ‘CRED’. When
people, Catholic or not, read about members of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom walking for nine days from London to Walsingham, when they saw in their parish church that a local family had donated a fine stained-glass window, when the paterfamilias took a slot in the small hours to watch before the Blessed Sacrament during a FortyHours devotion, or when they witnessed a whole parish turning out to dig the foundations of a new church (as they did), they can see that these people really believe. This kind of thing has great power to reinforce the Faith, and to draw people into it. The Second World War, however, and the social changes which came after it, loosened the bonds of family and place. The war itself threw together people from quite different backgrounds, and post-war rehousing, rising numbers going to university, television, and the expanded possibilities of travel, meant that members of such formerly tightlyknit communities increasingly had relationships and ideas with and from a wider range of sources than before, and correspondingly less contact and sense of solidarity with fellow Catholics. In the middle of this process came the Second Vatican Council. The timing makes the separation of different factors more difficult, but it is not coincidental. Progressives, at the Council and after it, consciously wanted to ally themselves with the forces undermining the depth and strength of Catholic communities. They felt that they were on the winning side: they stood with open-minded modernity, against the grumbles of the older generation. It was an illusion, however. At bottom, it wasn’t so much the young chafing against artificial restrictions: it was, rather, that the old, social, restrictions were simply disappearing. The question the Church faced at that fateful moment was whether to find ways to counteract the dissolution of the Faith community, before the mutual example and support which is so necessary to it was fatally weakened, or whether to accelerate and
WINTER 2019
