A new lay group, Better Church Governance (bcg), has hired Mr Scala to probe the lives of the 224 men who advise Pope Francis (including their sex lives, if any). His particular focus will be the 124 who, were the pontiff to die tomorrow, would elect his successor. Mr Scala’s team of up to ten investigators will publish their findings on a website, alongside carefully screened information from the public. Philip Nielsen, bcg’s executive director, hopes the website, dubbed the Red Hat Report after the scarlet zucchetti (skullcaps) worn by cardinals, will be online within a month.

Though apparently well funded, the bcg is a tiny fragment of Christianity’s biggest church. Catholicism claims 1.3 billion followers and wields vast, global influence. Its report would have seemed unthinkably disrespectful, almost sacrilegious, even a year ago. But in the Catholic world much that was once inconceivable is now transpiring. The Red Hat Report is a sign of how much many Catholics have come to mistrust their leaders and how far some will go to hold them accountable.

In the ten years to 2010, the Vatican sifted through around 3,000 cases dating back to the middle of the previous century. Increasingly, however, attention has shifted to the role of bishops in covering up for clerics, often by posting them to other dioceses where they continued to abuse minors.