Anyone reporting critically on the papacy, however objective their intent, risks being caught in the crossfire between the liberals and conservatives, the scruffies and the neats, as I call them, of our Church. Some years ago, the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, once thought of as a future pope, offered an explanation. He said:
We are not all contemporaries in a biographical sense... some are in the 1990s, some Catholics are still mentally in the 1960s and some in the 1940s, and some even in the nineteenth century; it’s inevitable that there will be clashes of mentalities.
