Before Vatican II, numbers of Catholics across the globe were exploding.  Consider just a few stats regarding American Catholics as listed in the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators:

  • In 1930, the USA had 27,000 priests, but by 1965 that number nearly doubled, bringing the total number of American priests to 58,000.
  • In 1930, the United States had 20,203,702 Catholics.  By 1965, that number had sky-rocketed to 45,640,619.  This means Catholics were not just reproducing, but making many converts.
  • By 1965, American priests, nuns and lay people had built the world’s largest conglomerate of hospitals, universities, high schools, grade schools and charitable organizations ever seen in the history of a young country.

After Vatican II, Index of Leading Catholic Indicators reveals the following about the Catholic Church in the United States:

  • In 1965, there were 1.3 million infant baptisms, but by 2002 that number had dropped to only 1 million.  (This is despite the fact that the number of Catholics in the United States rose from 45M to 65M, partly due to immigration.)
  • Between 1965 and 2002, the number of diocesan high schools dropped from 1,566 to 786.
  • In 1965, there were 1,575 ordinations to the priesthood but in 2002 there were only 450 American men ordained to the Catholic priesthood.  That is a decline of 350% following Vatican II.

If these tanking numbers were due to simply the sexual-revolution of the 1960s or the scamdemic of the 2020s, then why have so many Catholics left the Church over the last 50 years for Bible-believing Protestant communities all over the world?  Were Protestant communities unaffected by the sexual-revolution or covid?  Rather, something happened interiorly to the Faith in the Catholic Church in the 1960s that made it unattractive to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

In fact, things are even worse over the last decade in the Catholic Church due to idolatry and ultra-leftism emanating from Vatican City:

  • Even the Vatican’s own Pontifical Mission Society now admits: “While the Catholic population is growing worldwide, the number of baptisms has declined. It fell from 17,932,891 baptisms worldwide in 1998 to 13,327,037 baptisms in 2022.”
  • Catholic Culture reports “Between the end of 2020 and the end of 2021, the number of seminarians worldwide had declined from 111,855 to 109,895.”

Dropping numbers obviously have a moral component, too. For example, predation against children among these Catholic-apostates is no longer hidden—but rather approved—even at an institutional level:

  • St. Jude hospital in the US now brings children to Pride parades as reported by Lepanto Institute.
  • The Vatican had a drag show for children as LifeSite News reported.

It is almost hilarious that the Vatican in a new document titled Dilexit Nos now names traditional Catholics as the problem:  “The Christian message is attractive when experienced and expressed in its totality: not simply as a refuge for pious thoughts or an occasion for impressive ceremonies. What kind of worship would we give to Christ if we were to rest content with an individual relationship with him and show no interest in relieving the sufferings of others or helping them to live a better life?… The Church also needs that love, lest the love of Christ be replaced with outdated structures and concerns, excessive attachment to our own ideas and opinions, and fanaticism in any number of forms, which end up taking the place of the gratuitous love of God that liberates, enlivens, brings joy to the heart and builds communities.”—Dilexit #205, 219

Both paragraphs imply that traditional Catholics tend to pull-up the drawbridge to a broken world, whereas the social justice warriors are the true missionaries who build communities that endure.  The numbers prove the opposite.  Notice that my recent stats come from “the Pontifical Mission Society,” not a traditionalist website.

In any case, the good news is that the fringe Catholics labeled as “fanatics” who have “impressive ceremonies” are ironically the only ones growing and building a true culture of the Gospel for both rich and poor.   That is, traditional Catholic are growing.  So much for the old accusation that traditionalists are not missionary in spirit.  Thankfully, the true and Apostolic Church is growing, while the counter-church is collapsing.  The conclusion is obvious:  Vatican II auto-destructed the faith of millions of Catholics.  Time to return to the way we always did it in the Catholic Church.

Thanks to Anthony at Return to Tradition who brought the stats found mid-article to us.  Top left pic is firefighters battling a blaze at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer, France on 2 Sept 2024, p/c Marc Demeure, Photopqr, Voix Du Nord.