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"Vicomte,
Are you saying that the selling of indulgences was an error of the Roman Church? Was it a mistake? Was it a fallible practice of the infallible church?
Do I smell the acrid aroma of hypocrisy from the RCC, or is there a simple way to hand-wave it away?"

The selling of indulgences and every burning at the stake ever done were all errors of the Catholic Church.
The Church is only infallible on matters of faith and morals, which is a narrow, narrow set of things. And it is only infallible because of the Holy Spirit, which God promised would be with his Church.
The men running the Church have often been scoundrels, and some are even to this day (the pedophiles). The Devil continues his assaults on all men, including those of the cloth. Saved once doesn't mean that you can't fall to the Devil again. And the men of great power in the Church have often fallen.

But what are matters of faith and morals.
This is very tricky, and not wholly satisfactory either. There is no list or codex of infallible doctrines.

Faced with this morass, and with such a bewildering array of things, what is one to do?

I have my own answer to this, which is very simple: I rely on the Jesus of the Gospels, and I rely on the sacraments he instituted, which I believe can only be properly consecrated by the priests of the Church who have been duly ordained in apostolic succession going back to Jesus.

Thus, I consider the Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican Catholic priests in the apostolic succession to be properly ordained priests from whom the sacraments Jesus and the Apostles instituted can be properly obtained.

In this sense, there is an aspect of the Sadduccees at work. Certainly in Jesus' time, the Sadduccees were the priestly party and controlled the Temple and its sacrifices. And their lives and internal belief systems, and teachings, even, were aberrant. But there were still the holy sacrifices, which MUST be performed by the consecrated priesthood, and even Jesus directed people to adhere to the sacrifices and was properly redeemed himself. Likewise, Paul before the Sanhedrin and High Priest was properly respectful. The men were tombs, but the office of the priesthood - the power of sacrifice and consecration - was still of God in spite of the rotten wood.

I do not take communion chez les Anglicans or the Orthodox because it is a disciplinary rule of the Catholic Church not to, and because the Orthodox would not welcome a Catholic to do so.

Obviously I am not going to defend the historical murders, barbarities and sins of simony of the Church, just as I am not going to defend the pederasty today. I don't know all of the infallible doctrines, because they've never been published. I do know that that ESSENTIALS are Jesus' teachings about faith, and participation in the Holy Sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Communion, Penance, Marriage and Extreme Unction. To be ordained as one of the clergy is not my path, because celibacy is not something that a Frenchman will long keep, and it's better to be a married layman than an adulterous priest.

There is no simple hand wave away of the sins of the past and present. They are real. They were real in Jesus' day too, but he still prescribed the Temple sacrifices to those he encountered, and was still redeemed by his parents, etc.

The Gospels are the keys to faith.
The Sacraments are the mainstays of faithful practice, day in, day out, year in, year out.
Ordained priests in the apostolic succession must perform the sacramental rites, and therefore there is nowhere else to go.
The other ills and the painful acts of history must not be denied but observed. It is good to live in a democracy with free religion, and to be a Catholic. It was exceptionally bad to live in a theocracy either under the HRCC, OR under Calvin (who burned people) OR under Luther's regime (which burned people), OR under the Anglicans (who burned people) OR under the Puritans (who hanged people and crushed them under weights and burned them too).

Religious men are not appropriate rulers of any land, because they are both interested in monetary affairs (commanding patrimonies, as they all do), and because they are fanatics for their faith, and can take their authority to pursue sin so seriously they forget that they are not permitted to shed blood. Burning someone to avoid shedding blood deserves hell, even if that's not what ultimately happened to all those who order it.
But that is in God's hands.