And no one here, certainly not I, has denied the sinfulness of particular popes. I only deny that it had much to do with what went on in England during Henry VIII, other than the fact that his rightful queen and legitimate wife was the aunt of Charles V, whose armies occupied Rome at the time. It is discouraging that you seem so full of hatred that you have to dig up all the dirt you can, however irrelevant it may be. The stuff of racy tabloids. And, normally, dear Sir, when one copies and pastes material from a book, or from a website (as you have done) it is with acknowledgement of the source.
I would also point out that much of the sinfulness of popes or others within the Church is catalogued and condemned in CATHOLIC sources, such as the Catholic Encyclopedia, or by various Catholic authors. Your author even uses the Catholic Encyclopedia, although feebly; to blame Clement VII for the sins of Charles V (or his soldiers) is patently absurd. Clement VII was embattled on all sides, but was true to Catherine of Aragon (as he should have been), and his own private life was free utterly from reproach. There have been plenty of "bad" popes. But, there is also much gossip and false accusation. Julius II, for instance, because he had enemies galore in the violent Renaissance world of Machiavelli, and because he was the particular locus of animus on the part of Protestants over his failure to reform the Church, has been the target of much innuendo. Yes, he fathered an illegitimate daughter 20 years before his election as pope, but there is absolutely no proof of the sexual accusations your author mentions. Enemies stir up lies, . . . much like the false rumors of Catherine the Great having sex with her horse. Indeed, there were widespread rumors at the time, that John Calvin was sodomite. Most such historical attacks are bogus and political in origin. In the 40 popes since 1565, not one has been shown to have been sexually active during his pontificate. More to the point, however, there have been plenty of good popes, even heroic popes, among the 267 men upon whom the office has been bestowed. Shall we explore the sins of Protestants? Three insurance companies in the United States that provide liability coverage for 165,000 Protestant churches revealed data to the Associated Press in 2007 that they typically receive 260 reports every year of children being sexually abused by Protestant clergy or other staff. And the abuses occur in every Protestant denomination.
But, to get off the sex angle and back to the main point, as far as the state of the late-medieval English church is concerned, I direct you to my previous posts, to the authors mentioned above, particularly to Knowles, and to Haigh, and to Ronald Hutton, as below:
The impression of lay people enthusiastically committed to the Church is further supported by the evidence of wills. These survive in their thousands for the early sixteenth century, and show that gifts of money and valuable objects to the Church (usually the testator's own parish church) were almost universal. Another symptom is the proliferation of parish guilds or fraternities, literally brotherhoods (though women could be members in their own right). These voluntary associations of lay people were dedicated to a saint or Christ-centred devotion (Our Lady's Guild, St Michael's Guild, Corpus Christi Guild) and had a mixture of religious and social obligations, holding an annual feast on the patron saint's day, maintaining lights before his or her image in church, ensuring decent burial for guild members and saying prayers for them. Most parishes seem to have had at least one fraternity, and they proliferated in towns: London had over 150 of them in the century before the Reformation, and even somewhere like Great Yarmouth boasted at least nineteen.