I found such statements to be offensive to the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI and the memory of Saint Pope John Paul II. Not to mention all of the truly outstanding popes of the modern era and throughout the Church's history. Now of course we have the statistical data which highlights the fact that the "Francis Effect" was nothing more than wishful thinking.
From the Pew Forum:
"Pew Research surveys conducted over the past year found no change in the share of U.S. adults who identify as Catholic, or in self-reported rates of Mass attendance."
Patrick Buchanan writes, “The 1950s were America’s Catholic moment. The moral authority of the Pope and America’s bishops was never higher. Long lines formed outside confessionals on Saturdays. It was standing room only at Sunday Mass [the same Mass now disparaged by the progressives today]. Fr. Patrick Peyton’s Rosary Crusade (‘The family that prays together stays together’) drew huge crowds. The most visible prelate was Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, whose television ratings bested those of Milton Berle. ‘He’s got better writers than I do,’ quipped Berle. Notre Dame’s legendary gridiron teams had millions of ‘subway alumni.’ Four out of five Catholics cast their votes in 1960 for John F. Kennedy, who became our first Catholic president...Half a century on [since Vatican II], the disaster is manifest. The robust and confident Church of 1958 no longer exists. Catholic colleges and universities remain Catholic in name only. Parochial schools are closing as rapidly as they opened in the 1950s. The number of nuns, priests, and seminarians have fallen dramatically. Mass attendance is a third of what it was [broader participation?]. From the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to vice president Joe Biden, Catholic politicians openly support abortion on demand...
Four decades after Vatican II, a quarter century into the pontificate of John Paul II, Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis pulled together a slim volume of statistics demonstrating that the fears traditionalists who warned that the council was courting catastrophe had been justified. And they exposed as naive those who insisted that the council would revitalize the faith, reconcile Catholicism with modernity, and make the Church more appealing to our secular world. Here are Jones statistics on the decline and fall:
Clergy. While the number of priests in the United States more than doubled to 58,000 between 1930 and 1965, between 1965 and 2002 that number fell to 45,000 and is on course to sink to 31,000 in 2020, when more than half of all Catholic priests will be over the age of seventy.
Ordinations. In 1965, 1,575 priests were ordained. In 2002, the figure was 450.
Parishes. In 1965, only 1 percent of parishes were without a priest. In 2002, 15 percent, or 3,000 parishes, were without priests.
Seminarians. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians fell from 49,000 to 4,700, a decline of more than 90 percent. Two-thirds of the 600 seminaries operating at the end of Vatican II have closed.
Nuns. In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic nuns. By 2002, that number was down to 75,000 and their average age was 68. By 2009, their numbers had fallen to 60,000, a loss of two-thirds in four and a half decades.
Teaching Nuns. In 1965, there were 104,000 teaching nuns. Today, there are 8,200.
Jesuits. In 1965, 3,559 young men were studying to become Jesuit priests. In 2,000, the figure was 389.
Christian Brothers. The situation here is even more dire. Their ranks have shrunk by two-thirds, while the number of seminarians has fallen by 99 percent. In 1965, there were 912 seminarians in the Christian Brothers. In 2,000, there were seven.
Religious Orders. The number of young men studying to become Franciscan and Redemptorist priests fell from 3,379 in 1965 to 84 in 2000. For many religious orders in America the end is in sight.
Diocesan High Schools. Almost half of these high schools operating in the United States in 1965 had closed by 2002, and student enrollment had fallen from 700,000 to 386,000.
Parochial Schools. In 1965, there were 4.5 million children in parish grammar schools. By 2000, the number had plunged to 1.9 million. In the first decade of this century, the number dropped again, to 1.5 million, a loss of two-thirds of Catholic parochial school enrollment since Vatican II - in a country whose population grew in that period by over 100 million.
In 2007, after interviewing 35,000 people for its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the Pew Forum confirmed what Jones had reported. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church in America had undergone a decline to rival what happened in some northern European countries during the Reformation. By 2007:
One in three Catholics reared in the faith had left the Church.
One in ten American adults was a fallen-away Catholic.
Catholics remained 24 percent of the U.S. population only because of immigration. Forty-six percent of all immigrants are Catholics. As Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Catholics leave the Church or die, the pews fill up with Mexicans, Central Americans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese. Were it not for immigrants, Catholics would have fallen from a fourth of the population to 18.4 percent, or less than one fifth...
Catholic losses have been ‘staggering,’ writes Fr. Joseph Sirba, ‘if one excludes immigrants and converts from the calculations, the Catholic Church has lost to other religions or to no religion at all 35.4 percent - or more than one-third - of the 64,131,750 of its native-born members....
The Catholics who remain in the Church are not nearly as firm in the faith or devout as their parents were. The institutional shrinkage mirrors a spreading disbelief in doctrines that define the faith....Where a 1958 Gallup poll revealed that three of every four Catholics attended Mass on Sundays, a recent study by the University of Notre Dame found that one in four Catholics attend Sunday Mass today.”
Is this the “broader and richer participation of the laity in the apostolic life of the Church” that Vatican II was said to have accomplished?
Shall the lying stop now?
