Anatomy of a Lethal Autonomy - How Our World Stopped Being Christian

Its author, Guillaume Cuchet, is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris (Est Crétail); in his view 1965 was when the collapse of religious practice occurred in France. Note: at the beginning of the 1960’s, 25% of the French population attended Sunday Mass; in 2017 there were only 1.8% of the Catholics left in the churches each Sunday.

1965 was the end of Vatican Council II. G. Cuchet refuses to see that as a cause, but he admits that the Council was “the triggering event” of this breathtaking decline (p. 130). His intention is to stay with sociological—or anatomical—description and does not want to risk seeking the cause. Attributing it to Vatican II, in his opinion, is part of “integrist or Traditionalist polemics” (p. 131).

He does propose several attempts at an explanation after all. He states that the religious liberty promoted by the conciliar document Dignitatis humanae was understood by Catholics as “a sort of unofficial authorization to rely henceforth on their own judgment in matters of their beliefs, behavior, and practice of religion” (p. 132). He cites Father Louis Bouyer, who in 1968 declared: “Everyone no longer believes and no longer practices anything but what suits him” (p. 133).

In the last two chapters, G. Cuchet studies two particularly significant facts: the crisis of the Sacrament of Penance and the crisis in the preaching of the Last Things, in other words the deserted confessionals and the pulpit that had fallen silent about the truths of salvation. Here the “anatomy” turns into an autopsy.

In 1966, one year after the end of the Council, Abp. Marcel Lefebvre wrote to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

The doubts (introduced by ‘numerous texts of the Council’) about the legitimacy of authority and the requirement of obedience, which have been provoked by the exaltation of human dignity, the autonomy of conscience and liberty, are shaking all societies, starting with the Church, the religious communities, dioceses, civil society, the family.

- Quoted in I Accuse the Council

The founder of Ecône had been able to observe, in one year, what sociology of religion is discovering today, more than 50 years after the fact.

Fr. Alain Lorans