[Desdemona]

Vatican II clearly relaxed standards within the Church which permitted the sex abuse scandals to occur. If you check the statistics, you will see that while a great many of the clerics were ordained before the Council, most of the cases of abuse occurred AFTER the Council.

You think that VII was all there was to it? No, secular creeping or anything else had to do with it? Like, maybe the teaching had already gotten lax in places? Or, that this sort of thing had been happening for a long time and had been kept VERY quiet.

[ultima ratio]

Yes, I do believe it was Vatican II, most definitely. Some of the behavior of priests and seminarians--and nuns--was inconceivable before the Council. You fail to understand the completeness of the revolution, how old restraints were discarded, how worldliness was courted deliberately. Seminarians today have almost no interior prayer life to speak of; daily Mass is optional; they are embedded on college campuses and mingle with other students freely; they watch t.v., attend movies, go out to party, and cruise the bars. This is a far cry from the monastic training in prayer and asceticism which had been the rule before the Council. It's true a lot of offending priests were the product of the old training--but they would be the first to admit it was the atmosphere of license that prevailed following Vatican II--not to speak of the growing theological acceptance of homosexuality in many quarters within the new Church--that released their darkest inhibitions.