In their explanations, the commission members were careful to guard against a misreading of this sudden decrease that lasted 25 years: first, that downward trend stopped and was followed by a stagnation; second, the “virtuous” decrease was not in any way due to a sudden sanitization of the Catholic Church, but was a mere mathematical effect of the dramatic secularization and de-Catholicization of France, of the loss of both practice and faith that becomes so obvious during those exact same decades, and of the abrupt, massive, and continuous cuts in the number of priests, congregations, choirs, Catholic boarding schools, etc.
