YEAH, IT'S THOSE DAMN HIPPIES!!!

(h/t Atrios)

Hippies as in "sex, drugs and rock & roll."

I was listening to the radio in the background and I caught some of this and I just passed it off as more wingnut nonsense. It's turns out that it's an official stance of the Catholic Church.

Church Report Cites Social Tumult in Priest Scandals
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: May 17, 2011
NY Times

A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.

Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.

This is one rebuttal given in the Times article to this "dirty stinking hippies" report:

Kristine Ward, the chairwoman of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition, said the cultural explanation did not appear to explain why abuse cases within the Catholic church have shaken places from Australia and Ireland to South America. “Does the culture of the U.S. in the 1960s explain that? It’s hard to believe,” she said.

Our favorite Faux News Catholic blowhole also weighed in:

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a conservative Catholic group, however said he believes permissiveness in the church in the 1960s and 1970s - particularly at seminaries - had been a significant reason for the rise in sexual abuse. Mr. Donohue said that while he generally supported the report’s findings, he believed that the study seemed to have purposefully avoided linking abuse cases with the increase in the number of gay men who became priests during the 1960s and 1970s. “The authors go through all sorts of contortions to deny the obvious - that obviously, homosexuality was at work,” Mr. Donohue said.