“Little attention has been paid to the efforts of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict in attempting to combat the homosexual network that had infiltrated the church in the 1970’s.”
To my understanding the change for the seminary discernment process ruling out homosexual oriented men only happened after the scandals hit the media, which was post 2000, 20 years after the drastic decline in abuse instances actually occurred according to the John Jay study.
The best I can come up with as to why the instances of abuse actually declined is because older gay priests died and weren’t replaced by younger gay priests. You would think that if some sort of discipline accomplished it they would readily explain what it was. As it stands now I suspect it was simply a matter of gay men becoming priests at mush lower rates, and this affected the % of priests who abuse because the majority was homosexual abuse.
Freegards
From the biography of Cardinal Ratzinger:
“Prior to 2001, the primary responsibility for investigating allegations of sexual abuse and disciplining perpetrators rested with the individual dioceses. In 2001, Ratzinger convinced John Paul II to put the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in charge of all investigations and policies surrounding sexual abuse in order to combat such abuse more efficiently.[145][146] According to John L. Allen, Jr., Ratzinger in the following years “acquired a familiarity with the contours of the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic Church can claim” and “driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as ‘filth’ in the Church, Ratzinger seems to have undergone something of a ‘conversion experience’ throughout 2003 and 2004. From that point forward, he and his staff seemed driven by a convert’s zeal to clean up the mess”.[147] In his role as Head of the CDF, he “led important changes made in Church law: the inclusion in canon law of internet offences against children, the extension of child abuse offences to include the sexual abuse of all under 18, the case by case waiving of the statute of limitation and the establishment of a fast-track dismissal from the clerical state for offenders.”[148] As the Head of the CDF, Ratzinger developed a reputation for handling these cases. According to Charles J. Scicluna, a former prosecutor handling sexual abuse cases, “Cardinal Ratzinger displayed great wisdom and firmness in handling those cases, also demonstrating great courage in facing some of the most difficult and thorny cases, sine acceptione personarum (without exceptions)”.”
Prior to that it was mostly lay Catholics who tried to rid the church of homosexual priests. In many cases they were opposed by local priests and bishops.