Well of course. You list these societal stages as if you are pondering various salads on a menu.
No, I point out what to us may seem obvious, but to many here is unthought. Many give the impression that they think it as simple as one side thinking the moon is green cheese and killing others cause they think it is blue.
We must examine what happened in context, not to excuse it, but to get a realistic understanding of why things happened. Of course, for some, this is unnecessary. They desire Catholic to be pure evil and no amount of understanding why things happen is required.
And their divorce was a monumental moral advance.
Yes, the affiliation with secular power was corrupting of the Church. But still pure secular power with no heed given to any higher authority is not a bed of roses either.
So those who tell me that it was in some sense better that heretics were killed -- better, you say, because, after all, heresy was just a species of sedition.
No, I said heresy and sedition were the same thing. We only now seperate them. We are so used to relativism in matters of religion that the entire concept of a person's belief impacting on society is unclear to us. We are used to not caring what the guy down the street believes. That is because, in a large part, we have become indifferent to him and we have become comfprtable with the idea that there is not so much truth to be known that is worth defending from error.
SD
Jesus apparently thought that defending truth did not require force. (I'll give you one money-changer-temple episode if you'll give me an overall thrust of eschewing coercion.)
The simple historical principle is that the church's departures from His attitude correspond to the wax and wane of her persuasive power.
Shades and tints of inquisitorial force are probably needed to correct the caricature. So by all means correct. But the original portrait to correct TO is the Nazerene, not some other, even papal, stop along the way.