The core traditionalist indictment of the Second Vatican Council is easier to state than the people making it usually realize.

The argument, in its everyday form, is this: the crisis in the Catholic Church happened after Vatican II, therefore it happened because of Vatican II. Empty pews after 1965. Collapsing Mass attendance in Europe and North America. Vocations in freefall through the 1970s and 1980s. Catechesis unraveling. A visible drop in reverence.

Ergo, the Council did it.

I grew up inside a family that took this argument as axiomatic. My father took it as axiomatic. Bishop Williamson preached it at our union hall in Syracuse. The Society of St. Pius X built 40 years of institutional identity on it. Half of American conservative Catholicism is now arguing some version of it in some form.

There is only one problem: it is, logically, a textbook example of the fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc — “after this, therefore because of this.” Two things happening in the same window of time do not, on that ground alone, prove that one caused the other. To make the causal claim honestly, you have to rule out the alternatives.

The alternatives have not been ruled out. When you actually look at them, the traditionalist case collapses.

The alternative the argument never engages: mainline Protestantism

Consider what happened to American mainline Protestants during exactly the same window the SSPX blames on the Council.

• In 1965, the mainline denominations had roughly 31 million American members.
• By 1988, that number had fallen to 25 million.
• By 2005, it was 21 million.
• By 2024, mainline Protestants were 11 percent of American adults — down from 18 percent just 17 years earlier.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) shows the pattern in miniature: 4.25 million members in 1965; 2.5 million by 2000; 1.25 million by 2020.

These are catastrophic declines. They are worse, per capita, than what the Catholic Church has experienced in the same countries. And they happened, at every step, to communions that had no Vatican II, no vernacular liturgy imposed on them by Rome, no ecumenical outreach in the 1960s that they could plausibly blame for their empty pews.

The Presbyterians did not decline because of Vatican II. The United Methodists did not decline because of Vatican II. The Episcopalians in the United States and the Church of England did not shed the majority of their pews because of a Catholic Council they were not attending in the first place.

They declined because Western society, in the same window, secularized.

If the same disease is hitting communions that had no Vatican II and communions that had Vatican II — with severity that in many cases is worse among the ones without — then the Council is, at minimum, not the sufficient explanation the SSPX has made it out to be. The likelier explanation is the one the traditionalist argument refuses to consider: the driver of the post-1965 decline was Western secularization, and Vatican II happened to coincide with it, not to cause it.

What the sociologists have actually found

The pattern is not local. It is global, and it has a name.

Researchers publishing in Nature Communications — drawing on work from the University of Lausanne, Oxford, and the Pew Research Center — have documented what they call the P-I-B sequence: Participation, Importance, Belonging. Around the world, secularizing societies follow the same three-step decline: first, public religious participation drops. Then, the personal importance people assign to religion drops. Then, finally, people stop identifying with the tradition at all.

The sequence unfolds regardless of denomination. It unfolds in Catholic France, in Anglican England, in Orthodox Bulgaria, in Lutheran Germany, in Buddhist Japan. Europe is furthest along it. Africa is near the beginning of it. The Americas and much of Asia are somewhere in between.

That is what a general societal cause looks like: a pattern that affects everyone, at their own pace, according to their society’s underlying secularization curve — not according to whether their bishops attended a Council in Rome in 1962.

The SSPX has taken a global sociological pattern and blamed a specific ecclesiastical event. That is not analysis. That is scapegoating.

And now the harder data — where the Church is actually growing

Here is the fact the traditionalist argument cannot survive contact with.

The Catholic Church is growing. In 2024, the global Catholic population reached 1.422 billion, up from 1.406 billion in 2023 — an annual increase of more than 16 million people. The Church added, in one year, the population of Ecuador.

Where is that growth happening?

Africa. Africa’s Catholic population rose from 281 million to 288 million in 2024, an increase of nearly 3 percent. Africa’s share of the global Church has risen from 19.9 percent to 20.3 percent in a single year, while Europe’s has slipped from 20.4 percent to 20.1 percent. The center of gravity of Catholicism is moving south of the equator.

Asia. Growth in Asia is slower than Africa, but the trajectory is also positive, and vocations from countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, and South Korea are helping stabilize seminaries in places where local vocations have collapsed.

Now the question the traditionalist argument does not want you to ask. Why is the Church growing in Africa and Asia?

Vatican II is the answer the SSPX cannot give

The single Council document most responsible for the growth pattern in Africa and Asia is not one traditionalists talk about often. It is called Ad Gentes — the Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church — and it was the last document approved by the Second Vatican Council, on December 7, 1965.

Ad Gentes did three things that a pre-conciliar mission strategy did poorly or not at all.

First, it decentralized. Missionary activity, under Ad Gentes, is entrusted to local churches — African bishops leading African evangelization, Asian bishops leading Asian evangelization — rather than being run out of a single Roman congregation. That decentralization is the reason there are now nearly a hundred African bishops leading dioceses on their own continent, ordaining African priests, forming African seminarians, and shepherding some of the fastest-growing Catholic communities in the world.

Second, it enabled inculturation. Since Vatican II authorized the vernacular liturgy and encouraged the Church to translate the Faith into the languages, music, and symbols of local cultures, African and Asian Catholicism has developed forms of worship that are recognizably local and unmistakably Catholic. That inculturation is what Chinese, Filipino, Nigerian, and Kenyan Catholics recognize as their Faith rather than as a European import — and it is a direct product of Council reforms the traditionalist movement despises.

Third, it tied evangelization to charity for the poor. The Church that showed up in sub-Saharan Africa in the second half of the 20th century — running schools, hospitals, clinics, and relief programs alongside its parishes — is the Church the Council explicitly commissioned. That combination of proclamation and service is a large part of why millions of Africans are entering the Church rather than leaving it.

The bishop of an SSPX chapel in Kansas does not have a strategy for growing the Church in Nigeria. The Council did. And the Council’s strategy is working.

What this argument actually is

The post hoc case against Vatican II is not really an argument about causation. It is a lament dressed up as a syllogism. The people advancing it have watched a form of Catholic life they loved contract in the West, and they have picked the most visible institutional event of the same period as the villain.

I understand the lament. I grew up inside it. I know how it forms. I also know that when you take it out into the world of actual global Christianity — where Presbyterians and Anglicans and Methodists and Lutherans have declined faster, in the same window, without any of the reforms the SSPX blames, and where the Catholic Church, using the strategies the Council authorized, has grown by the population of a small nation in the last year alone — the lament stops looking like a diagnosis. It starts looking like a refusal to notice the rest of the room.

Vatican II is not the reason the West secularized.

Vatican II is one of the reasons the Global South is being evangelized.

That is not the story the SSPX tells. But it is the story the numbers tell, and the numbers are what a serious Catholic argument is finally accountable to.

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Photo by Sahand Babali on Unsplash