Its "good old days" are the middle ages and its organic/corporate/guild culture (which many Catholics regard as utopia).
Puts me in mind of what Admiral Doenitz' Nazi U-boat sailors called their "happy time," in the battle of the Atlantic WW2. Later in the war, they looked back at the time they had control of the Atlantic shipping lanes, it was their "good old days." Too bad both totalitarian regimes, Hitler and the middle ages RCC, lost their control.
The medieval RCC was not a totalitarian institution. The Middle Ages were simply saturated by and assumed Catholicism, just as the Bible Belt is saturated by and assumes Fundamentalist Protestantism.
Not everyone could own weapons and there wasn't much social mobility, but aside from occasional predation by barbarians or the rogue liege lord medieval life was probably far less regulated and far freer than life in American today.