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Vatican II opened the floodgates. After the Council, new moral principles on sexuality and the gay orientation were openly espoused with impunity. Before this, most seminaries were incorrupt, though a few were turning "squishy" as Shaw states. Afterwards, the decline was precipitous. So too with lay Catholics. After the Council all hell broke loose, especially with the double-whammy of a scornful rejection of Humanae Vitae and the introduction of the Novus Ordo. Before the Council, deference to any encyclical had been the norm. But the laity had grown accustomed to the idea that anything could change, even the Mass and even fixed dogmas.

Then again, look at the recent study by the lay commission on the sex abuse crisis in the Church. There was certainly some abuse of minors in the 50s. But at nowhere near the rate found in the 60s and 70s. And while nobody is denying that there were problems before the Council, to seize on this to justify what happened after the Council is to lose perspective. It is the predictable argument of liberals who are always ready to seize on any excuse for the disasters that followed their radical interpretation of the Council. The truth is the Council made every one of the Church's problems far worse because it gave full license to the modernist agenda. Seminaries threw off their monastic preconciliar trappings--and became almost universally corrupt as a consequence.