Reviewed by: Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II by Stephen Bullivant Tom Beaudoin Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II. By Stephen Bullivant . New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 336 pp. $32.95. Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II . By Stephen Bullivant. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 336 pp. $32.95. Roman Catholicism is in a difficult predicament, especially in Western countries where it once seemed solid and even powerful—if only the power of a robust minority. What seemed a self-sustaining world of shared faith, religious identity, and distinctive practices stands in deep crisis. In the United States and Britain, Catholic affiliation has trended substantially down, the moral authority of the Catholic Church has eroded considerably, and younger generations—when they choose to retain some involvement in the church—are hardly invested in maintaining the Catholic culture for which their elders sacrificed. This complicated, socially and spiritually profound shift in the fortunes of Roman Catholicism has been lived in families for several generations, even if it has been insufficiently acknowledged by church leadership for the ecclesial emergency that it is. Stephen Bullivant's Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II is a timely, data-rich foray into how this happened. Bullivant brings theology and social science to bear in constructing a lively narrative to account for the affiliation crisis as experienced in both countries. Although plenty of comparisons are made between the United States and Britain, Mass Exodus is not so much a comparative project as it is a complementary history of Catholic disaffiliation in both countries. Bullivant tells this history through a readable assemblage of quantitative, qualitative, and historical studies. Readers will gain access to a wealth, especially, of relevant social science literature. Bullivant's discussion of early studies of Catholic disaffiliation is particularly helpful, because it fills in the underappreciated history of longstanding attempts to study Catholic nonparticipation. Tracking the terminology by which scholars have tried to register less-than-active Catholic involvement usefully complicates contemporary assumptions about "Nones" and "Somes," "active" and "inactive" Catholics. [End Page 81] While the connection between Vatican II and the decline of Catholic fortunes is the conundrum at the heart of the book, Bullivant shows that Catholic practice was already changing (and measured by official standards, declining) during the Conciliar era. Bullivant is thus able to illustrate how affiliational decay had sources that both preceded and exceeded the changes introduced by the Council. Falling away from "normative" belief and practice, in other words, has not only impacted Catholicism, but has affected many established Christian denominations. (Indeed, Bullivant argues that Catholicism in the United States does much better than many other denominations in retaining members, although a competition to lose less than one's neighbor is not one in which any heritage denomination wants to be involved.) The heart of Bullivant's argument is that secular and postsecular developments since at least World War II in both countries are inherently opposed to Catholicism's essential truths and the necessity of its being different, and that Vatican II bears responsibility for making it considerably harder to muster the countercultural stances required of Catholics today. Making effective use of core concepts from recent social science, Bullivant takes the Council to task for participating in the undoing of what made Catholicism a dense culture of shared and sacrifice-inspiring practices that stood apart from the world. In his reading, Vatican II was too permissive in its liturgical reforms because it was too eager to be "relevant" to a world that was ultimately indifferent to Catholic relevance. This is a serious argument that joins a heady cluster of academic interventions over the last decade into the meaning and legacy of Vatican II in light of what looks like the considerable ecclesial fragmentation that followed. I read this book as someone raised Catholic after the Council, formed deeply by 1970s and 1980s suburban middle-class white Catholicism—the subject of considerable attention in Mass Exodus. I wondered where were the voices of those noble sisters, deacons, priests, and lay religious educators of that era in these pages...