“Angry abuse victims in America last night said that while some Church officials have blamed the liberalism of the 1960s for the Church’s sex abuse scandals and cover-up catastrophes, Pope Benedict had come up with a new theory of blaming the 1970s.
“Catholics should be embarrassed to hear their Pope talk again and again about abuse while doing little or nothing to stop it and to mischaracterise this heinous crisis,” said Barbara Blaine, the head of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests,”
Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, therapists, etc. were acting on theories in the 1970's that adult male atraction to other males, whether adults or children, was on the "normalcy" spectrum. They said it was not a manifestation of mental illness, or at least not a disorder so intractable that it could not respond to therapy. In the 1970's leading mental health figures said that "boundary issues" could be managed by counseling.
The fact that those ideas were current in the 70's is very easy to document. It's certainly true that some religious superiors took the "therapeutic" approach ("He just needs to learn how to manage his sexuality issues better") and relied on experts to certify that an offender had gained an "insight" about his "boundary issues" and now could be trusted to function within a parish.
This turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Sometimes there was real moral negligence on the part of these superiors, but just as often, I think, it was a well-intended but naive "therapeutic approach" --- one that had terrible and long-lasting consequences.
And it's clear that Pope Benedict grasps this, which is one of the reasons that in 2001, it was Benedict (Ratzinger) who convinced John Paul II to put the CDF in charge: precisely to get past therapy-oriented Bishops, as well as rotters like Weakland. He moved in personally to combat the abuse more efficiently.
According to the NCReporter's Vatican reporter John Allen, Jr., Ratzinger was "driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as 'filth' in the Church. [He was] driven by a convert's zeal to clean up the mess". See article (Link)