What this article omits is that the Cultural Revolution of 1968 was pretty much civilization wide, not just American.
There were riots in Paris, and Charles de Gaulle fled to his country estate until things calmed down.
There were riots and terrorism in Germany and Italy.
The anti-war protestors and hippies in America had their counterparts all over Europe and the West.
Riots, burnings, barricades, revolutionaries throwing cobblestones in the cities of Europe—it was widespread.
And the fallout in Europe after Vatican II was as bad as it was in America, if not worse. The bishops over there are still more dissident or weak than they are in this country, even after decades of failing to fix the problem.
Ireland stood fast for a while, but now they seem to be as troubled as anywhere else.
The Church has gone through major troubles in the past, but this certainly has been one of the worst and most widespread.
It was indeed, and the participants even have names for themselves: sesentayochistas, in Spanish, and something similar in French.
I have always felt that if the Church had held strong, things might have turned out differently. But it collapsed too.
And while the French and Germans had been busy nourishing clerical heretics for decades, I think a lot of the liturgical and practical changes reflected the desire of American Catholics to stand out less. The intellectual underpinning, of course, was the German Higher Biblical Criticism with its faux archaeology of the "primitive" Church, a mythical time of purity that the Protestants believed preceded Romish corruption.
“There were riots in Paris, and Charles de Gaulle fled to his country estate until things calmed down. There were riots and terrorism in Germany and Italy. The anti-war protestors and hippies in America had their counterparts all over Europe and the West.”
Spain was spared this until Franco’s death, at which point they over-compensated for the freakishness he spared them from. Now they’re at the bottom of the pile in terms of culture or faith - like Italians, ethnic Spaniards are contracepting themselves out of existence; like Americans, they’re being replaced by Hispanics.