Just reading the introduction to that book made my flesh crawl. Martin argues from fundamental assumptions which he never spells out, but which (as far as I can tell) seem to be rooted in a very unCatholic soil. I couldn't tell exactly what point he was trying to make, but it seemed as if he were arguing that the Catholic Faith was dated and irrelevant, and that it was just a matter of time before it imploded. He spoke of John XXIII inheriting the "dry rot" of Pope Pius XII's Church without ever establishing anything about that alleged dry rot or where it came from, and he spoke of the papacy as head of an ecclesiastical hierarchy as if that were a 16th century invention.

I could be wrong, in part or entirely. I tried to read the introduction carefully, and even went back and reread parts of it. All I'm sure of is that I have no interest in reading the book itself.