Free Republic

In his December 11th column, Patrick Buchanan wrote about the decline of Catholicism in the Church since Vatican II, based on statistics collected by Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis. Among the findings: dramatic decreases in Mass attendance, an incredible loss of faith in the Real Presence, gigantic drops in the number of seminarians, priests, and religious, and a sky-rocketing increase in marriage annulments. In response to Buchanan's article, Carl E. Olson from Envoy Magazine countered with the typical Neo-Catholic line that Buchanan and other traditionalists have simply "misunderstood" Vatican II, that the council has not even been fully "implemented"...

A recent article in the New York Times about the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the Church commented matter-of-factly: "The Council's documents, shaped by the bishops and their theological advisers in four two-month sessions held each fall from 1962 through 1965, offer more than enough compromises and ambiguities for conflicting interpretations." There is no doubt about it. As the most verbose Council in the history of the Church by at least a factor of six, it is the sheer volume of words that smothers a plain interpretation of many Vatican II documents, providing support both for a novel...

Thirty-seven years after the end of the only church council of the 20th century, the jury has come in with its verdict: Vatican II appears to have been an unrelieved disaster for Roman Catholicism. Liars may figure, but figures do not lie. Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis has pulled together a slim volume of statistics he has titled Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II. His findings make prophets of Catholic traditionalists who warned that Vatican II would prove a blunder of historic dimensions, and those same findings expose as foolish and naive those who believed...