What can be said in defense of the clerics who wreaked such havoc? They didn't know better? Their formation was poor?
It would be nice if I could tell you that my upbringing was unusual. I don't think it was. For us Post V-II kids (though I was born during the Council, I didn't go to school until after the Council, and after all the experiments were underway), this was often how it happened.
Your questions come down to, "Why did these priests and theolgians, etc., venture into the muck of heresy?"
I guess their intentions were good. I guess they were trying to bring the Church into the 20th Century or something. Ultimately, though, they did what they did because they chose to dissent.
Dear Lady in Blue,
"He's saying that whether a priest,bishop is good or bad,he comes from a FAMILY! A lot of families are NOT teaching their kids to pray and to ACCEPT ALL OF THE CHURCH's TEACHING!"
That is the opposite of what I'm saying. Catholic families didn't create these failed moral monster priests, bishops, theologians, seminary rectors, etc. They didn't originate in Catholic families with less than adequate faith or catechesis.
These men grew up. They were small in number, at first, I imagine. Perhaps some of them came from an inadequate Catholic background. But others likely came from very fine, devout, faithful Catholic families. Likely most of them. Because prior to the middle of this century, most American Catholic families would have been scandalized by what is now accepted as normal.
These men became failed priests, bishops, theologians, seminary rectors, etc., all on their own. Let's not blame Catholic families in general for these men.
These dissident priests then spread their disease of dissent to other priests and then to innocent Catholic families. People like my parents. The bishops did little to stop them. In my own Archdiocese, the late Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle was faced one morning with an advertisement in the local newspaper denouncing Humanae Vitae, signed by dozens of diocesan priests. Cardinal O'Boyle was called many awful names by many folks, especially other priests, when all the signers found themselves laicized in short order.
But Cardinal O'Boyle was fighting a rear-guard action. By the time this happened, in '68 or '69, the problems were all already set in place. And he only lopped off the heads of those who publicly dissented. He did nothing to the priests who dissented, and taught dissident teaching from the pulpits, but who didn't shout it outside the boundaries of their parishes. The message was, "It's okay to dissent as long as you don't shove it in the Cardinal's face."
My parents didn't invent this garbage. They got it from Fr. So-and-So and Msgr. Whathisname. Fr. So-and-so and Msgr. Whathisname got it from the guys who made it up, in the seminaries, etc., where folks thought that creating parallel "Catholic" teaching was exciting and pioneering and brave, etc.
Those corrupted Catholic families then passed on a corrupted Catholic faith to children of my generation.
But the problem didn't originate in the heart of Catholic families. Though many Catholic families are now largely corrupted by the almost unconscious acceptance of dissent, this is the result of the moral crimes of a previous generations of theological leaders, not the cause.
sitetest
There may be a slight distortion in the media coverage of this as "Catholic" priests molesting children rather than as "homosexuals" infiltrating the Church. The question which needs to be asked is why homosexuals (who happen to be Catholics) consider the Church an appropriate and desirable place to stage their perversion. This is almost in the order of unusual fetishes in sexual perversion. In terms of the relevant psychological disorder what seems to be going on is a linkage of two things which usually don't go together - Catholic religiosity and sexual perversion. This is a psychiatric problem which needs further study and clarification. It has been suggested that they are working out "anger" through this misbehavior. At some level, there is an "in-your-face" hostility being directed at the Church, its teachings, and normal heterosexuals. I mean, not everybody who dissents from Humanae Vitae molests teenagers of the same gender. These are highly unusual and disturbed people involved in these scandals.