Nice soft answer to a hard criticism. Good technique in a bad cause. The Catholic Church fell in love with secular power and hasn't learned the lesson yet. That it made amends to Joan of Arc and Galileo years after it murdered or imprisoned them is just a reminder of what the church did wrong. I live a few miles from a seminary where dozens of young men were homosexually molested, and the molesters were not turned over to the secular authorities for punishment. Rather they were hidden and moved away from the scene of their crimes. I cannot forget this as I drive by this place several times a week. This isn't the fault of a few people, it is a fault of the institution. The bishops and cardinals knew of this and did nothing. Jesus wept.
It brings about humility.
Yes... the church has not been perfect, but to point only the bad and miss the untold good it has brought to millions really is a travesty.
All Christianity stems from Catholicism. This cannot be ignored. You must also remember the untold number of Christians, Catholic as well as protestant, that have died for their beliefs also needs to be brough to mind.
To say that the church is evil, and would be willing to bring back the inquisition is not only far off the mark, but insulting to those who are Catholic.
My answers were not soft, but stem from a deep faith.
A historical novel has two elements: background and foreground.
In the foreground, the author is free to invent characters and have them do and say anything he wants. It is understood that this is fiction, the author's invention, but even here it is sometimes understood that the author is telling truths about real people for which he would be sued if he used real names.
The background, though, is expected to be historical. In a novel about the Civil War, the North still wins, Lincoln is still president, etc. etc.
The reason you can't say of DVC that "it's just fiction" is that he lies about the background, the things that people assume to be factual in a historical novel.
Imagine an historical novel about WWII that presented Hitler as a misunderstood saint. How far would that "it's just fiction" argument go?