People disagree with Emeritus Pope Benedict blaming the '60's.

1968 saw revolution across the globe, from France 

to Mexico and Prague to the US.

"Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom." - Benedict XVI

Older Catholics should understand what Benedict was talking about.  Yet many are taking issue with it.  I have a feeling what he had to say is not enough for them, and if it is too much, many will want follow up explanations, they want footnotes and links to documentation to back up his statements.

I left a comment on Fr. James Martin's FB page drawing his attention to Charles Curran as well as the Jesuits who dissented from Catholic teaching on artificial contraception, and in the '70's, Catholic teaching on homosexual behavior and same sex unions.  Reading Benedict's letter, I felt I understood what he was saying and recognized many of his references.  

Actually one man, Charles Curran has been credited with changing Catholic education in the United States.

Did he ever!  How many studied at Catholic U and went on to teach elsewhere?  In seminaries, colleges, high schools and so on.  How many became bishops?  They call it a 'coup' which completely changed Catholic education.

Curran had been clashing with the Vatican over his relatively liberal views on sexual ethics since an event twenty years earlier that Father Peter Mitchell calls “a crucial and defining moment in the history of Catholic identity in the United States.” Mitchell takes readers through this “defining moment” in his new book, “The Coup at Catholic University.” 

As the author explains, Curran was the embodiment of a mentality that was quite prevalent in the late 1960s: “That religious authority was in direct conflict with freedom, that dogma was the enemy of free thinking and that any kind of moral code was somehow hindering people from making free choices.” - Source

I'm astonished that many people seem to forget what the world was like in 1968.



One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children.

Fr. Martin downplays what Pope Benedict wrote, as do others, citing the John Jay Report, yet  Karen Terry of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and principal investigator of the Bishops' study pretty much blames the 1960's as well:

So what does explain the rise in abuse? A major reason, she says, was the 1960s. 

"There's a sexual revolution, there's an increased amount of drug use, there's an increase in crime, there's an increase in things like premarital sex, in divorce," Terry says. "In a number of factors, there's change. And the men who are in the priesthood are affected by these social factors." - Source

So let's not be too quick to dismiss Pope Benedict's letter.  I suggest reading, meditating, reflecting and pondering what he had to say without self-referential cynicism.  How soon people forget the past, which allows the abuse to continue and become legitimized.

Germany's left has its own tales of abuse.

 One of the goals of the German 1968 movement 

was the sexual liberation of children. 

For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, 

creating a climate in which even pedophilia 

was considered progressive.- Source

Ratzinger knew what was going on then, and as Pope Emeritus, he knows of what he speaks now.

Do not dismiss Benedict's claim, "Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate."  Just Google it - there is ample evidence, and in some places, even a link to homosexuality.  The British PIE (Paedophilia Information Exchange) movement sought support from the homosexual movement, just like NAMBLA in the United States was associated with the Gay Rights movement for a time.

The most shocking of all is Germany's Green Party support, which began in the late 1960's:

In the late 1960s, for example, a prominent sexual researcher named Helmut Kentler created a pilot program in which he arranged for illiterate young teenagers to move in with three known West Berlin pedophiles in the hopes that they could then learn to live “proper, unremarkable lives.” In a later report he explained that he believed the “three men would do so much to help ‘their’ boys because they had a sexual relationship with them.” - Source

The Green Party no longer supports paedophilia - but the fact that it could and did publicly is shocking.

Anyway.  Read Benedict's letter, disagree if you want to, but I strongly suggest you do some research on what he has to say.