When  Cardinal O'Farrell speaks of how things were twenty years ago he is not criticizing John Paul II. Rather he is saying that the Mercy Campaign of Pope Francis has a context, and has reasons. The resistance to it only demonstrates its necessity and opportunity. Pope Francis is saving John Paul II from a rigorist reading that is totally inimical to it.  The critics of Pope Francis have usually skipped over the real profundity of the teaching of John Paul II; they only remember the journalistic summations which usually painted John Paul II as a narrow moralist and doctrinaire, leaving aside his theological depth.