Filtering Out the Faithful
Managerialism & the Fallacy of the Fallacy of Vatican II Survivorship Bias
It is often portrayed that the generally greater fervor, retention rates, and demographic success of traditionalists is mere survivorship (or selection bias): that the greater fidelity, mass attendance rate, Catholic belief, etc. of those Catholics is mere correlation, not causation. Those who care enough, the argument goes, to pursue the arduous effort to be traditional are going to be a more fervent sample than the more general Catholic population before Vatican II as a whole would have been.
This is true—to a degree: the very small “trad world” is, by the roadblocks, difficulty, and counter-culture nature of the project, a very, very peculiar bunch who by definition are going to be rather committed people.1
This argument, however, is made to claim that there’s nothing that a large-scale return of the Church to Her liturgical tradition would gain, and that, in fact, the Church would lose many recent converts and many attendees at the new rite who prefer its warmth, “active participation” and spontaneity if the “rigidity” of tradition were to again become the norm. Pushing, rather, toward even more of these things, the revolution’s backers argue, is the best way forward for the Church’s growth rather than turning toward a spiritually “elitist” direction:
Such an argument is rather persuasive, but misses the fact that a corresponding survivorship bias is present in the attendees of the average parish today. Those who have stuck around through the Novus Ordo for 60 years are only a small surviving subset of the Catholics from before the reforms. The cognitive fallacy of survivorship bias has led to a misunderstanding of the impact of the reforms by not accounting for those who were literally pushed out of the Church (in one way or another) by the liturgical revolution.
While the overall “Catholic” population has grown since Vatican II in the United States, what the crash in Mass attendance and other metrics of Catholics practicing the Faith since the Council and the reforms to the liturgy actually reveals is that the reform—that is the revolution of managerialization, Catholic Inc.-ization, and individualism and egoism—rather than making the Church more appealing, has instead been weakening and pushing out the most fervent members of the Church. The New Rite and new ways since Vatican II, rather than being the panaceas of growth and reform, are actually the more elitist rite with narrower appeal, have already attracted everyone they could ever attract, and “Vatican IIing” harder will only make declines in the Church worse, by filtering out even more of the fervent and practicing Catholic population.
Looking for the Causes of Decline
While the decline in Mass attendance (and even more so, in vocations and other metrics of Catholic life) over the last sixty years is undeniable,2 the real argument is who left and for what reasons. Defenders of the reform claim that decline was already happening and that changes helped prevent even worse decline, whilst opponents look at it as the beginning of decline.
Since any quick—or longer—look at the charts confirms at the very least that the decline accelerated just after the Council, I look at this question as who was more likely to leave and more likely to stay due to the New Mass.
A priori, most people who look at the question would tend to make the assumption that those who left were those who were already in some way wavering in their faith before the Council, and that these were also the same kind of people, by and large, whom, for at least some, the reforms would manage to save and keep in the Church through the “updating.” Those who cared a lot about their faith would stay either way, reform or no reform, right? Furthermore, the updating, by making the Mass more appealing to Protestants, would welcome more into the fold.
By this argument, all declines after the liturgical reform are not due to it, except perhaps by bringing in more people into the Faith on the margins. We can’t run a controlled experiment to measure this, of course, but the argument is that the Church fared better, at the very least, than it would have without the reforms.
Filtering Out the Faithful
Several sources cited by Nico Fassino in his research into the popular reception of the liturgical reform, however, tell a different story. Those who left or who grew weaker in the faith because of the liturgical changes weren’t those who were weak already, but paradoxically, many of those who were strongest in the Faith before the reforms.
The changes, which began to roll out in 1964, not 1969, had their backers. But neither were they universally applauded, with general dislike, especially amidst those who had previously been very committed and prayerful at Mass, for the chaos and confusion caused by the role of the commentator, a person who did just that, commentate and talk over the priest in the Mass to “explain” it and what was going on to the people. But though it aimed to increase active participation, it was one additional ruckus on top of all the other tinkering that was going on: mass being thrown into mandatory sonic chaos. As details of the Mass were thrown into flux, reverence, order, and rubrics began to fly to the wind, the revolution confused and destroyed the stable routines of devotion, the local pieties, customs, devotions, and prayer lives of the most faithful, fervent, and committed Catholics—and mandatorily for that matter—and then did it again, and again, and then again, throughout the 1960s, as liturgical commitees and advocacy groups kept advocating additional changes. And as early as 1966, right in the middle of the changes, these committed Catholics were attending Mass less often:
In mid-1966, Our Sunday Visitor again conducted a nationwide survey of lay Catholics regarding how the new liturgical changes had impacted their spiritual life. OSV summarized the findings by noting that while “many” liked the new changes, “a majority of those who replied were either uneasy, concerned, disturbed, or even dismayed by many of them.” This is confirmed by the impact the changes had on the habits and devotions of the laity:
32% reported attending weekday Mass less often following the changes (and 56% reporting no change)
34% reported going to confession less often following the changes (and 58% reporting no change)3
32% going to Mass less often and 12% more often means a net 20% of people, only a year and a half into the change, were going less often. And it’s, though tragic, easy to see why. The participation of the faithful, their real participation of faith and love, that is, had not been helped but in fact had been sabotaged by all the noise, change, and chaos and the elevation in importance of liturgical committees constantly promoting new ways to “improve” the liturgy as well as the increasing distractions, caused by the often egotistical and showy performativeness, a cascade of bad incentives promoted by the new liturgy and termed “ego renewal” by Thomas Day in his enlightening Why Catholics Can’t Sing.
As Dale Francis, an editor for Our Sunday Visitor, put it, the Catholic faithful who were having their doubts weren’t leaving because they were already on the fence about Catholicism:
“They are told that the new liturgy should bring them greater satisfaction, a new sense of closeness to Christ, and although they try, they have found no satisfaction; instead of a new sense of closeness to Christ, they have a frightening feeling that they are falling further away. […] “What is most evident from the letters I receive is that the people want to like the new liturgy. What bothers them most, however, is that they believe their failure to gain satisfaction is somehow their own fault. They aren’t rebels, they are good Catholics who want desperately to find in the changes what they are told they should find there but have not been able to.4
These people raising concerns about the revolution, and who, for at least some, had their faith wrecked and who were attending Mass less and less, weren’t people who would have left without the reform. No, these were people instead, who cared enough about their Faith to want the reform to work so that they could become even closer to Christ.
And when it didn’t work, while they did dislike the chaos, they, on some level, trusted the liturgy engineers’ promises that all this reform was for the sake of widening the scope of Catholicism and converting the world. And then they blamed themselves for not being able to make it work, meaning that many of those who left the Church were some of the most faithful Catholics, not the least.
Proportionally speaking, the far greater decline in vocations and membership in the priesthood and religious orders than amidst the laity at large after the revolution makes this point even more obvious, as TLM_Ryan’s research reveals. The more committed one was to the Church, the more likely the revolution might destroy you.
They who left, clergy, religous, and laity alike, not to mention so many pre-Vatican II bishops who were “retired” just after the council, were replaced in influence, though not in numbers, by that number of Catholics who were excited about reform, but far less so about the Church’s tradition, who saw fulfillment in “active participation”, anti-hierarchicalism, anti-rigorism, and even in becoming “trendy” and even “fun.”
This type of person, even by their own standards, is going to have a weaker spiritual life, a devalued attitude toward long-term commitments, and, in general, less faith.
The reforms, by pushing out those who actually believed, filtered for those who wanted instead a more man-centered, horizontal, and subjective rite, as well as those who gained power from the revolution and from implementing it, and who thus became intrinsically attached to it.
The Filter Flips
But when the initial revolutionary euphoria went away amidst those who were left behind after the dust settled (or didn’t settle), the filtering flipped.
Rather than the initial filter of the revolution, which destroyed the faith of many of the most fervent and filtered them out of the Church, now the banalities of the revolution’s success were making this whole Church thing too boring to keep the people who stuck through the heady revolutionary days around.
After filtering out the faithful, the incentives now optimize for creating a certain kind of Catholic or at least filtering out those who don’t fit that model
At the average parish, to stick it out through the beige spirituality that followed the 70s, the egostical turns in the liturgy: all the ad-libbings of the Mass, the distracting, often completely secular music, the shallow theology that preaches an ecumenism where the practice of the faith doesn’t really matter, you’ve either got to have a lot of faith personally as well as good earplugs and the ability to keep your mouth shut, or you’ve got to be an especially committed revolutionary who wants to push this whole modernizing train another step further.
When the Mass becomes a show where everyone wants to be the center of attention but no one, in their heart of hearts, likes the show, many people decide they don’t like the show.
Faithful Catholics Continue to Get “Filtered” Out
The decline of the Church across a range of metrics demonstrates that the system has been optimizing, not for faith, but for ideological alignment, and as Gene Thomas Gomulka argues, complicity.
Even worse, the Church is treated more and more like a business by the managerial structures that now run much of the show, the Diocesan Inc. and Liturgical Industrial Complex, which ran the revolution and now manage its continued implementation.
When a business is declining due to kicking out those who succed (in the Church’s case many of the most faithful believers), cash flow becomes paramount, and those who can provide it, regardless of their characteristics, have power, as Chris Jackson recently recounted with regard to the Neo-Catechumenal Way5 or any of the hierarchs of sketchy, lavendar colored backgrounds who are nevertheless skilled at raising money.
But treating the Church like a business filters out those who are left who want to treat the Church like a Church, the Faith as important, and moral truth as unchanging.
Any faithful Catholics who popped up were dealt with and rejected as rigid, either when attempting to enter seminaries or many religious orders, or as Christendom Quarterly put it in this excellent recent piece, “The Parish You Hate, Hates You”, in putting sand in the gears of anyone who attempts to break the mold of the Diocesan Inc. control of things:
The councils, the committees, the little fiefdoms of the men’s and women’s clubs, they exist not to grow, but to act as bulwarks against change. Even if the Pastor wants change, he has to deal with this interconnected web of laypeople who have his bishop’s office on speed dial and know exactly what to say for the pastor to get an unwanted call himself. “Uncharitable. Pushy. Demanding. Rigid.”
Pastors, then, have become powerless middle managers. They own 0 assets, are completely and utterly dependent on the whims of diocesan politics to survive and are under the thumb of the loudest complainers in the parish.
Those brave pastors who buck this trend are run over. In one of our local parishes, the priest was removed because he did not use the Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion sufficiently, and this labeled him as too much of a traditionalist.6
As the author put it, the purpose of this system is, as I’ve argued elsewhere, to ensure that revolutionaries remain in control, regardless of long term decline.
Any successful growth in faith and devotion in the Church, paradoxically, threatens the control of those currently profiting off the situation. And so it gets smacked down, whether it be at the local parish level, as Christendom Quarterly recounts numerous stories, or at a diocesan level, as in the ongoing saga in Charlotte, or in the broader Church through the suppression of faithful religious orders, whilst others flaunt their opposition to doctrine and tradition.
The Holy Spirit is working to bring about true renewal of the Church, to call people towards Faith, Hope, and Love. The metrics, as recounted by TLM_Ryan in several recent interviews and by Padre Peregrino reveal it. If the ongoing filtering out of success were to stop, the declines in the Church and the accompanying crises would even out and heal rather quickly.
But when the work of the Holy Spirit constantly get smacked down, those who succeed get cancelled our or filtered out and the machine of managed decline grinds on, Diocesan Inc. instead offers consultancy led transformation plans that bring short term excitement and flashy videos but don’t really bear fruit in terms of keeping people in the faith, coming to Mass, or bearing fruit in religious vocations. This only serves to reveal that the Catholic Revolution, as all revolutions do, started with shattering the ties and tradition of the past, but has ended in an authoritarianism far harsher and more constricting than the one they claimed to rebel against.
Being part of the revolution, that is, the managerial apparatus that has taken control of many affairs in the Church over the past 60 years, is, rather than being for opening up the Church, instead being more elitist and exclusivist. Those who actually believe are expelled or pushed aside. Many of those who stayed were more culturally Catholic and less faithfully Catholic, those, in other words, who wanted subjective, egotistical fulfillment but weren’t as fully bought in to this whole faith thing. And with standards lowered and institutionalized discouragement from growing deeper into that whole faith thing lest you take it all too seriously, or be too “rigid”, many of them, encouraged to relax, haven’t stuck around either.
The crisis is perpetuated, thusly, at least in part by the argument that Vatican II alleviated decline and needs to be leaned into even more, or “fully implemented.”
By presuming that the declines in the Church after the council were due to a weakness in faith that preexisted the revolution, the same logical fallacy of survivorship bias that led World War II era bombers to be reenforced against attack in the wrong areas because they saw only the bombers that had received non-lethal damage and not the ones that didn’t come back is in effect in those who proclaim that we just need to Vatican II harder because Catholics who are weak in faith are leaving now.
The real cause has been obscured by survivorship bias. The part of the Church that needs to be reinforced is the part that the managers are trying to keep under the rug, the tradition that the revolution, and the managerial infiltration that institutionally continues it are trying their best to filter out.
I’m being charitable, or at least mild. Maybe the real reason isn’t bias, but just that many of them don’t want to listen to the real reasons, because their status and power depend on it. But the managers of Diocesan Inc. aren’t counting the opinions of the people whose faith life the revolution itself ruined or whose success at resurrecting Catholic practice makes the managerial structures of Diocesan Inc. look bad by comparison, drawing ire, and a Stalin-esque elimination of them as “too successful” kulaks.7
Everyone who is interested in managerial Diocesan Inc. has been evangelized too by the Church of Nice over the last 60 years. There’s no one else left to attract with that marketing strategy. By lowering the standards of Catholic practice so utterly over the last 60 years as well as the meaning and value of the Faith, there’s no more to be gained from devaluing the brand even further.
While yes, there is a sort of selection bias going on amidst those few who have found a way to hold on to Tradition amidst the attempts of members of the Church itself to squash them, a terror being run from within the Church, the fact that many of the most fervent were kicked out first eliminates the rub of the argument against Traditionalism.
And though, as a whole, the numbers are still rather grim, the combination of growth against the fact that, in a numeric sense, based on TLM_Ryan’s research, traditionalists in the Church will soon be absolute majorities 15 years from now in France, and in around 50 years in the United States and literally the only survivors soon after that and the argument that traditionalism looks good only because of survivorship bias goes away entirely.
The only people who live to talk and worry about survivorship bias are those who survive.
And when the Church’s numbers for retention and faithfulness of its faithful, 60 years after the revolution, have gone from good, to bad, after the most faithful were kicked out, to now even worse, where “for every convert, 8.4 leave the Catholic Church in America”, doesn’t survival alone, let alone the thriving, accelerating growth that the traditionally minded are seeing count as an argument of its own—and a sign of hope even in the midst of a storm as dark as the last time an institutional apparatus(es) that was not the Church took control (the Avignon Captivity of the 14th Century).
The whole lesson of the revolution, and those who have survived it, moreover, has been that Faith, as well as living the Catholic life, counts a lot more for one’s Faith than one’s feelings about it.
Coming soon: Or maybe not so soon, unfortunately, as I’m a little behind and overloaded catching up at work: How and Why the Religious Orders Were Shattered in the 20th Century
See the National Bureau for Economic Research report: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34060/w34060.pdf
Nico Fassino, “The New Mass of 1964”, Hand Missal History. https://handmissalhistory.com/newmass1964part3/
Dale Francis, “The Mood of the Laity: How Are Catholics Reacting to the New Liturgy? Part 1: Confused, Frustrated, Bewildered,” The Critic, February/March 1965, pp 56-59. (sourced via Nico Fassino, “The New Mass of 1964”, Hand Missal History. )
Essay forthcoming someday.
Managerialism is merely the assimilation of church officials into North Atlantic managerial technocracies. It hasn’t work in the business realm, but the church elite have swallowed it to try and reverse decline. Instead it just speeds it up and makes it irreversible
I cannot imagine what it was like for a Catholic who loved the Mass, especially the High Mass, during the 60s and 70s. The new liturgy made no room for those type of Catholics and I imagine the changes and chaos shattered manys faith. For ritual to have meaning - it must be stable.
There are some who suggest we must force all Catholics back to the 62, 55, or whichever PreVII missal. But that would recreate the mistakes of the 60s all over again, because there are many faithful Catholics who have only known the Novus Ordo - and forcing them into the TLM would be a repeating the reformers mistakes and introducing instability in ritual.