John Lennon made the Beatles an easy target by his remark, but the fact is that church attendance was declining in England and elsewhere in Europe, a pattern that continued in the US some years later.  Although Pope Paul VI denounced Lennon’s statement (and actually Pope Benedict XVI apologized for this church stance in 2010), there were few church leaders joining the denunciation of the Beatles, since the Church was going through an intense period of re-examination in this time period.  For example, the Jesuit newspaper America wrote about the controversy:  “[John] Lennon was simply stating what many a Christian educator would readily admit.” 

Earlier that year, on April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine famously asked:  “Is God Dead?”  Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, an earthshaking event in the Roman Catholic Church that attempted to re-frame Catholic teachings in a modern context, leading (among many other major changes) to services being conducted in the language of the people attending rather than Latin.  The ramifications remain strongly controversial to this day. 

(September 2014)