The Church Was Already Pagan Before Vatican II

Why blaming Vatican II for all the Church's problems is historically naive

“The fact that today, even given an optimistic evaluation, certainly more than half of the Catholics (here we are considering only our Church) no longer ‘practice’ their faith, should not be explained clearly in the sense that this large number of non-practicing Catholics should simply be called pagans. It is still evident that they no longer simply embrace the faith of the Church, but that they make a very subjective choice from the creed of the Church in order to shape their own worldview. And there can be no doubt that most of them, from the Christian point of view, should really no longer be called believers, but that they follow, more or less, a secular philosophy.”
~ Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 1958, The New Pagans and the Church

A common argument against Vatican II and the reformed Missal of Paul VI is that they can be judged by their fruits. According to this line of reasoning, the dramatic secularization of Western Catholicism (i.e. falling Mass attendance, the collapse of vocations, widespread disbelief in the Real Presence, the loss of transcendence, and the general liberalization of Catholic life after the 1960s) constitutes decisive proof that Vatican II and the Novus Ordo were catastrophic failures. From this premise, the conclusion follows that the post-conciliar reforms should be abandoned wholesale and the Tridentine Missal reinstated as the universal Roman liturgy in order to “rescue” the Church from modernism.

But this argument collapses almost immediately under historical scrutiny.

As Cardinal Ratzinger observed before Vatican II in his lecture The New Pagans and the Church, even under a generous assessment, more than half of Catholics were already non-practicing and had effectively internalized a secular worldview. This diagnosis was not made in the 1970s, nor as a post-hoc rationalization of conciliar reforms, but in 1958, squarely within the so-called “golden age” of pre-conciliar Catholicism.

And yet these Catholics were attending the Traditional Latin Mass.

Should we therefore conclude that the Tridentine Mass was itself a “failure” because these bad fruits existed under its universal reign? Of course not. The inference would be absurd.

The more obvious, and far more historically defensible, conclusion is that the secularization of Catholic life both before and after Vatican II was driven by far larger cultural forces, forces whose origins reach back well beyond the Council, indeed deep into the Enlightenment. Long before any liturgical reform, the intellectual plausibility of a sacramental and supernatural worldview was already being eroded. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared in 1882, “God is dead.” What Nietzsche meant was not the disappearance of belief overnight, but the slow cultural replacement of a Christian metaphysical framework with modern materialism, scientism, and expressive individualism.

Closely allied to this was the sexual revolution, whose roots long predate Vatican II. From Sigmund Freud and the psychologization of desire, to the loosening of Victorian moral norms, to the normalization of contraception advocated by figures such as Margaret Sanger, the trajectory was already set well before the 1960s. The invention of the birth-control pill in 1960, second-wave feminism, and the “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll” counterculture did not begin the crisis; they accelerated and radicalized one already underway.

Crucially, these forces did not single out Catholicism. Every Christian denomination in the West suffered catastrophic losses in belief, practice, and institutional coherence during the same period. To isolate Vatican II and the reformed Missal as uniquely responsible for this civilizational upheaval is therefore not only theologically dubious but historically naïve.

It is also worth asking a harder counterfactual question, one traditionalists rarely confront honestly: Would the Church have fared better had Vatican II never occurred and Tridentine Catholicism remained unchanged? The answer is far from obvious, and there are strong reasons to suspect the opposite. As Larry Chapp incisively argues,

Are we to believe then that somehow the Tridentine form of Catholicism with its index of forbidden books, silencings of non-Thomistic theologies, Massa Damnata triumphalism, syllabi of errors, and its sloppy and perfunctory Latin liturgies would have been immune to that acid?? That the dour message of mortal sins everywhere – especially sexual ones – and the ever-present danger of eternal damnation for most of us was going to somehow light a fire of conversion in millions of people rather than the reverse?? I am deeply convinced that had this vision won the day we would be in even deeper Kim Chi than we are now.

Finally, the traditionalist narrative suffers from a profound selection bias.

If the pre-Vatican II Church was already over 50% paganized, and if the post-conciliar period intensified that crisis, then it is entirely predictable that those Catholics who remained orthodox and serious amid the chaos would later gravitate toward older forms of worship as a refuge. The comparatively high levels of doctrinal fidelity and fervor found in traditionalist communities today are therefore better explained by self-selection than by any intrinsic anti-pagan “immunity” contained in the Tridentine Missal itself.

Before Vatican II, the Traditional Latin Mass was simply the default and accepted as the norm by saints and pagans alike. After Vatican II, amid widespread liturgical abuse and cultural collapse, it became a starkly counter-cultural option, and thus naturally attracted those already inclined toward orthodoxy and discipline. The association between the Tridentine Mass and higher levels of fidelity is therefore largely an artifact of historical contrast, not proof of causal superiority.

In short, the claim that Vatican II and the reformed Missal are the decisive causes of the collapse of Catholic faith in the modern West cannot be sustained on any serious engagement with history. The crisis of belief is older, broader, and deeper than the Council and any honest diagnosis must reckon with the full weight of the cultural forces that reshaped all of Christendom in the twentieth century.