Getting the right balance --- understanding what are the sacramental graces, and what is the "earthen vessel," --- is ofter very, very difficult.
One flagrant and painful recent example was the shameful case of Fr. Marcial Maciel and the orders he founded, the Legionnaires of Christ and the lay association, Regnum Christi. Marcial Maciel was a habitual sexual offender, covering up his corruption with a veneer of piety and "good works". Many good and honest people --- like, sadly, Pope John Paul II --- just couldn't wrap their heads around the possibility that he was a hellbent pervert, and pulling others into his orbit of moral destruction.
Pope John Paul should have seen that Maciel was majorly into luxury, lechery and sodomy, but of course, that's just what you don't see when --as is so often the case --- the abuser is also a sociopathic liar. JP2's problem was maybe that, as a priest in Poland for so many years under the bootheel of Nazi and Communist regimes, he had seen so many good priests doing saintly work in the milieu of heroic resistance, and had witnessed so many dictators' characer-assasination campaigns against good clergy ("priests molest boys" was the standard slander, like "Jews poison wells") --- that he too often assumed the priests were good, and the bearers of filthy tales were the enemies of Christ.
It's a dangerous fault. And the opposite fault is equally dangerous: the cynicism, callousness, and reflexive detraction that assumes "so-called moral conservatives are closet pervs" and "guilty until proven Innocent".
I agree that Pope John Paul was affected by the culture in which accusations of homosexuality were the standard for taking down any celibate. I was talking with a couple of our other homeschool mothers just the other day (30 children between the 3 of us) and we agreed that once a culture rejects covenant marriage based on procreation, there is no moral line to be drawn short of physical force-rape. I’ve proposed this idea on FR, and nobody has given a counter-argument.
One of the ladies has a son in the Legionaries of Christ and is involved in Regnum Cristo (sp?). It’s unfortunate that good people have to deal with a crazy like Maciel, and it’s hard ... impossible ... to sort out the good fruits from the bad tree. I see something similar in the ongoing controversy over Medjugorie: was there a legitimate apparition? What about the visionaries? What about the spiritual fruits that people have experienced for decades?