Curious. Three well-known economists, Robert J. Barro (Harvard), Edgard Dewitte (Oxford), and Laurence Iannaccone (Chapman University), have submitted a paper to NEBR examining whether the Second Vatican Council caused attendance in the Catholic Church to decline faster than it did for other religious bodies and denominations that also experienced a profound period of secularization in this time. They argue that the council exacerbated the decline.

Now, I can imagine every kind of theologian easily spitting out objections to submitting the church’s life to the kind of one-dimensional analysis that economists offer. But a lot of nonsense can be hidden in six dimensions of analysis. As the fathers of the council reported of themselves, they were often in the throes of near-ecstatic fervor for reform, with great confidence in the coming growth of the church; but these economists find, across data from 66 countries (half in the global South), that the reforms of Vatican II had a measurable negative effect on attendance even when compared with that of other churches.

One other interesting note in the paper: The authors draw a line between the decline of female religious life, the loss of nuns, to depressed Catholic fertility overall. That is, the more consecrated virgins we have, the more Catholic moms feel they have confidence in a support system (in parochial schools) to help raise children.