Table of Contents

1: Looking Foolish
2: The Demographics of Disaffiliation
3: Why They Say They Leave
4: The Night Before
5: Gaudium et spes, luctus et angor
6: The Morning After
7: Unto the Third and Fourth Generations
Epilogue: Did the Council Fail?
Appendix
Bibliography

About the Author

Stephen Bullivant is Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion at St Mary's University, London. He is Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society. An award-winning scholar, Bullivant's research and teaching interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. Most notably, they include several areas of Catholic theology, and the social-scientific study of religion and atheism/secularity. His publications include The Oxford Dictionary of
Atheism (co-authored with Lois Lee; 2016), The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (co-edited with Michael Ruse; 2016), The Trinity: How Not to Be a Heretic (2015), and The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic
Dogmatic Theology (2012).

Reviews

For anyone interested in the history of the Council and its aftermath, this is an indispensable book. The writer's engaging style -- with occasional delightful humorous asides -- makes even potentially dry chapters of sociological analysis quite readable.
*Rev. Gavan Jennings, Position Papers*

Mass Exodus, wide-ranging and provocative, will likely challenge readers to square their own narrative regarding the Council's responsibility for Catholic decline with Bullivant's analysis. Bullivant's essential conviction that these important questions deserve a skilled and simultaneous social scientific and theological interpretation is a worthy one, and crucial for the future of these conversations.
*Tom Beaudoin, Fordham University, American Catholic Studies*

This is a timely publication. It should be required reading for those genuinely interested in the religious health of the Catholic community. It should also be required reading for sociologists of religion more broadly, and perhaps journalists interested in the evolution of ideas in society.
*Leonardo Franchi, Innes Review*

This is a major book about Catholic decline because it provides basic statistics about disaffiliation, reasons about people leaving, and factors contributing to the mass exodus over the last decades.
*Pierre Hegy, Adelphi University, Catholic Books Review*

This is an important work demonstrating that the Catholic Church is indeed in a state of unprecedented crisis, written from a sociological and historical perspective.
*Pravin Thevathasan, Catholic Medical Quarterly*

This is a cogent, well argued and well researched book which I would thoroughly recommend to all parish clergy and to those who take their faith seriously. It gives a truly scholarly and much deeper background to the decline in attendance in the Catholic Church in the last seventy years than any one other book so far published.
*Rev D N J-M Bayliss*

Professor Bullivant's "social-scientific" account of the state of the Catholic Church is a welcome contrast to the partisan antagonisms of Catholic journalism and pulpit prejudice.
*John Cornwell, Financial Times*