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
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).
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*
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