In 2003, 25-33% of 60 million Catholics are at Mass every Sudnay - 15-20 million.
Bet ya the figures for mainline Protestant denoms are roughly the same, if not worse. And they didn't have no Vatican II!
You apologists for Vatican II are wrong again. On the contrary, the mainline Protestant denominations went through exactly what the Catholics did - jetisoning their traditional liturgy for a made up modernist concoction and updating their dogmas.
The revised Luthern and Episcopalian Liturgies are almost word-for-word the same as the Novus Ordo. They use exactly the same lectionary.
And it was in the 1960's-70's that all these Church's "got relevant" and suddenly "saw the light" on women's ordination, abortion, fornication, divorce, liberation theology, etc., etc. The evil seems to have started with VCII and spread directly into all the mainline Churches from there.
Many in my family were Episcopalians, and they all stopped attending (except my mom) when the Church "got relevant". As my grandmother put it, in words that could have come straight out of the mouth of a Pius X'er - "When they changed the liturgy, it was like they took your whole faith away from you. I just said to myself, if they are going to take that away, what is the point of going? So I stopped"
As far as attendance falling, the mainline Churches never had the attendance figures of the Catholics. It would surprise me if more than 50-60% went every Sunday. In many denominations it has long been true that only 30-40% attended. Today, the Catholic Church has actually fallen to a lower attendance level than even the low level of attendance at the mainline Churches.
Catholics had avoided succumbing before. What was different in 1960? The difference was the Institutional Church succumbed and lead the laity astray. Alvin Toffler (admittedly not a Catholic source), states his belief that the 1960's would not have been as radicalized as they were had the Church not changed. In other words, the Church was the vanguard, not something going with the flow. This should be intuitive. The Church made her changes by 1965-1967. The real radicalization of the US and World followed in the 1968-1972 period (i.e. Paris University Strike was in 1968, Abortion legalization started in the 1967-1969 period, etc.).
Bet ya the figures for mainline Protestant denoms are roughly the same, if not worse. And they didn't have no Vatican II!
Present Roman Catholic and Protestant figures here. RC = 24%, Proto = 20%.
The article also contains an example of the Catholic attendance collapse: "The Archdiocese of San Francisco has collected attendance data from all its parishes since 1961. In the subsequent 35 years mass attendance fell by almost half, dropping from 205,000 to 107,000. Yet two surveys of community residents in the three-county archdiocese area (one in 1972 and one in 1996) reveal a very stable Roman Catholic population and a stable proportion of Catholics who say they attended church."
As I said, nope! You are wrong. Protestant attendance was always much lower.
"Catholic losses from 1955 to 1975 were proportionately greater than Protestant, so that now 40 percent of Protestants and 55 percent of Catholics report attendance during the past week, compared to about 44 and 74 percent, respectively, in 1958." <a href="http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1978/v35-3-criticscorner1.htm>From 1978, source here.</a>