I take it that Miller believes, like Pat Buchanan, that if we could just return to the 1950s, everything in the Church and the world would be sweetness and light.
What he fails to point out is that the worst of the offenders (Shanley, Geoghan and others) were in the pre-conciliar seminaries and were ordained well before Vatican II "ruined" the Church.
There's no turning back the clock. Let's stop worrying about returning the Church to some kind of triumphalist "glory,"and start worrying about serving the people as Jesus did.
If they're about 70 now, they were probably ordained in about 1960. Vatican II was announced in 1958 or 1959. But I think all the things that burst out in Vatican have to have had their seeds in the 50s, as the hippies of the 60s were in some ways the offspring (in some cases perhaps literally) of the beatniks of the 50s. I did read somewhere that many of those in the hierarchy who attended Vatican II pushed through a lot of their agenda while the rest of the bishops were still getting used to the Latin.
Geoghan, in particular, probably owes his ordination to his monsignor uncle who pulled strings to keep him from being thrown out, but I doubt that using influence is particular to any one period.
The problem with the two of them is that their "careers" mostly ran after Vatican II. These things must have occurred before, but I think Shanley, in particular, would have had a much harder time pre-Vatican II -- I don't think priests worked with "street kids" (that wasn't an observed social problem then.
Of course, I was only a kid in the 50s and there were no altar girls. The only bad experience I had with a priest in the 50s was getting thrown out of Sunday school because I wasn't in the parish (I was nine years old, and my parents had separated that summer; my mother wasn't coping, and I got myself to Sunday school with a friend. I still don't like the Redemptorists.)