I think the "egregious event" was the sexual revolution, no doubt partly spurred by the advent of contraceptives. As someone who doesn't have a problem with the issue of contraceptives for "married couples", I'm a bit cynical about placing all the blame at the feet of the contraceptive pill.
There were other factors at play, one of which was the widespread development of visual media - films, then television, followed by VHS, DVD's and now the internet, making it all too easy to access pornographic material. Then there was the the almost universally accepted doctrine of the separation of church and state, which to my mind comes straight from the devil. All it does is empower secular politicians at the expense of the church.
I happen to believe one of the reasons God is allowing a resurgence of Islam is not only as a judgment of the post-Christian West, but because they also have no division of religious and political life. Mind you there is a lot of hypocrisy and immoral politics in Moslem nations as well, since they're made up of fallen human beings just like us, but at least the modus operandi is there.
Incidentally the word "egregious" has the following meanings according to one online dictionary -
"outstandingly bad; shocking eg. "egregious abuses of copyright"; synonyms: shocking, appalling, horrific, horrifying, horrible, terrible, awful, dreadful, grievous, gross, ghastly, hideous, horrendous, frightful, atrocious, abominable, abhorrent, outrageous".
I think it would be absurd to think he was referring to Vatican II, unless we're going to call a Council called by Pope John XXIII "horrendous, frightful, atrocious .. and all the rest". That would be plain stupid.
At the same time, humanity had reached what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (another German incidentally - like former Pope Benedict - my old pastor once commented about the Germans that "they're good thinkers") called its "coming of age" and would from now on have to make moral decisions within an existential framework, and which would become increasingly confident of its own abilities. In the West we now live to our eighties on the average, we can fly from continent to continent on a lazy Sunday afternoon if we've got the money and nothing better to do; watch the football on the other side of the globe; and destroy ourselves with submarine launched nuclear missiles should such a stupid event unfold. Astronomers and scientists and engineers have just photographed a black hole using a network of world wide radio telescopes, thus affirming a prediction by a Jewish, non-Christian scientist. We can even debate topics of Catholic concern with other Catholics and non-Catholics on the other side of the earth, living in a very different time frame and climate.
I also happen to believe that God intends to drive us off the planet and out into the universe. To that end He's allowing us to muck around with space travel, robotics and artificial intelligence, and experiment with quantum entanglement and quantum computing, which I believe will be the precursor to instantaneous "teleporting". But maybe that's just my own odd opinion.
Meanwhile the Church is struggling to come to terms with this relatively new found confidence of humanity. At the same time, the sexual revolution rampaged into some religious orders as well, as we have witnessed to our frustration over the last few years.
So in my opinion, the Church is going to have to define just what Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant by "secular Christianity" (I don't think he was sure himself, and was martyred before he had time to really come to grips with it), and then it is going to have to work out how to deal with it. Or it is going to find itself struggling to find its place in an intergalactic civilization for which the city and citadel of Rome will just be a distant memory.
That is, how is the Church going to empower the "secular Christians" in her ranks, so that they are able to stand on their own two feet, with or without a priestly presence to guide them in matters of faith and morals?
