I'll try. There is a very old debate in the Church about whether people who made deathbed confessions were saved, or whether one had to have lived a converted life for a period of time that manifested one's commitment to Christ. There was also a longstanding debate about whether one could be saved by good works, even if one deviated from the "true faith." This led to some suspicion about people who were "fast-tracked" to sainthood through martyrdom precisely because the details of their former lives were either not known or not known to have been virtuous.
If you know books like "Butler's Lives of the Saints," you will recall that the medieval idea of sanctity emphasized extraordinary virtue and lifelong self-abnegation, as opposed to good works. So the question raised over the centuries was whether people whose lives didn't conform to church teaching could be saints. (Do you perhaps remember the book "The Devil's Advocate?" on a similar question?