What Happened in 1965?

I have often wondered:  What went wrong with those marvelous Catholic theologians who inspired and exhilarated me as a college seminarian in the theological euphoria immediately after the Vatican Council with their exuberant, hopeful, confident and Christ-centered visions? I am talking about: Schillebeeckx on Christ as the sacrament of encounter with God, Moran on catechesis and on-going revelation, Kung on ecumenism, Padavano on Christ in culture/literature, and others. Their writings, during the Council period of 1962-5 offered fresh and exciting, catholic and Catholic, reflections on how the light of Christ radiated vast realms of culture and society. Fast forward just a few years, however, and these same theologians had left the parameters of the Catholic Church. What happened to them? And why was it that other theologians of renewal...Ratzinger, DeLubac, Dulles, Karol Wojtyla...during this same period of the late 1960s responded to the Cultural Revolution of the West in a contrary way, by intensifying their loyalty to classic Catholic values and beliefs? I wonder if there was a theological infection of "individualism" in the thought of the defecting thinkers which rendered them vulnerable to the anti-Catholic animus of that Revolution. By contrast, the loyal theologians seemed to have been fortified and immunized against that malady by a confluence of three distinguishable but commingled loyalties, intimacies, love affairs: with the person of Jesus Christ, with the actual Catholic Church, and with the conjugal mystery of family-marriage-vocation-chastity-fidelity. The single foundation for Catholic life is a love affair with Jesus Christ. Everything else flows from this. But the Catholic receives and reciprocates this love within a rich network of ecclesial loyalties: immersion in sacramental life, filial love for the hierarchy and our Blessed Mother, humble participation in the Communion of Saints. And thirdly, the Catholic identifies with a specific position within a certain family (biological, religious order, diocese) within the greater Church family as son/daughter, husband/wife, religious/priest, father/mother, and brother/sister. This last involves what we call "state in life" and is a concrete, specific position and relationship...gendered and familial...within the Church. So, the Catholic can be described as a Lover involved with three-in-one love affair(s): with the singular person of Christ, within the structured Church, and very concretely in a spousal/familial identity as father/daughter/husband/sister/etc. By contrast, the defecting theologians mentioned above seemed to embrace an exaggerated  contemporary autonomy and renounce the classic forms of Catholic love: the masculine, celibate priesthood; sexual love as inherently unitive-fruitful; and filial communion with Tradition and authority. Even otherwise solid, profound, faithful and learned theologians of renewal like Rahner and Lonergan seem to have focused on the believer as an autonomous thinking-deciding-acting individual (like post-war European existentialism) outside of the defining conjugal realities. As a result, their followers show more sympathy for diffuse modern individualism and less apprehension of classic Catholic structures of intimacy.  For my part, I want to retrieve the liberating progressive visions that exploded within the Church in the time of the Council even as I stay rooted in the tripartite, concrete, intelligible love affair with Christ, within his Church, in my particular structured spousal-familial identity.