Ordinations of new Catholic priests in Britain have fallen to one tenth of the number in 1965, and marriages and baptisms have also dropped significantly.
Details of the declines have been revealed for the first time by the compilation of statistics for these sacraments over the past century.
The figures were compiled by the Latin Mass Society, whose chairman said they “show unambiguously that something went seriously wrong in the Church in England and Wales in the 1960s and 1970s”.