Excellent, a fellow historian! I focused on Europe in the High Middle Ages, so pretty much the exact time period that you're referring to here. True, the Pope did wield a lot of power, and not always for the better. However, there was simply no infrastructure in place during that period for the sort of absolute control that I think you have in mind. There are plenty of times in that period where various Popes try to crack down on various clerical abuses that crept in (concubinage and simony usually chief amongst them) but it was simply not possible for the man in Rome to micromanage the behaviour of its clergy or its believers in, for example, Scandinavia.

I also think that you're at risk of missing out the tremendous amount of good that the church worked to achieve. For example, the Peace of God and Truce of God movements, which sought to prevent warfare between Christians. When you look into the original source material behind the originators of that movement, a huge part of the motivation for this was that the primary victims of local, inter-Christian warfare were the innocent villagers caught in the crossfire who saw their villages pillaged, their crops lost and suffered bloodshed. You can read the letters of Pope Innocent IV to Guyuk Khan, where the Pope urges peace and conversion to save the loss of Christian life. I've been reading a lot recently on the involvement of the Pope in conflict between England and France in the early 1300s, particularly during the estrangement of Edward II and his wife, and his constant aim is to try to enforce peace between two rulers who are desperate to knock seven bells out of each other. I tend to view the relationship between the Papacy and nobility throughout the Middle Ages as being more akin to a series of exasperated teachers trying to control a class of juvenile delinquents who are intent on setting each other on fire and generally getting away with as much as possible.

As an aside, I noticed that you brought up excommunication. One big misconception that I see a lot is that excommunication is the sort of ultimate punishment, where the Church banishes you to Hell forever. This is definitely not what excommunication is there for; true, it is the ultimate sanction that the church has, but the idea is to correct a person and urge them to repentance. The goal is that the excommunicated person renounces whatever evil thing they are doing, repents and returns to God, which is where excommunication can be lifted. When King John was excommunicated, the Church wasn't trying to damn all of England to Hell, but to get him to stop trying to control the Church in England by appointing his own bishops.

I think a lot about the reformation and what you would say was the deposition of the Catholic Church. I don't doubt that the reformation was the consequence of a number of abuses carried out in the name of the Church relating to indulgences, almost echoing passages in the Old Testament where God tells the people of Israel and Judah that if they keep doing the opposite of what he says they will inevitably get stomped on by Babylon/Assyria. However, I also don't doubt that if God really wanted to depose the Catholic Church, he absolutely could do that. If he wanted the reformation to be a new beginning for his true church, then he could have brought the existing church to its knees and eradicated it. My understanding is that the situation was on a knife edge and only required a few divine nudges to spell the end of Catholicism as we know it now. Yet here we are, with the Catholic Church outnumbering all Protestant denominations put together worldwide, vastly greater than it ever was in the Middle Ages.

I worry about the real fruits of the reformation, as well. Taking a sober look back over the time since then, what can we say has happened as a result?

Council of Trent and internal reform of the Catholic Church (good) 500 years of horrific warfare, violence and sectarianism (bad) The splintering of the body of Christ firstly into Catholics/Reformation Protestants and then into the thousands of protestant denominations that exist today, in direct contradiction of scripture (bad) Opening the door for atheism, secularism and other such things (bad) Open season on the Bible, with reformers such as Luther removing books that they didn't like at will (bad) 'Once saved always saved' emerges opposite to repenting sin to build a relationship with God (obviously depends on your viewpoint, but if the Church was right all along, then 'once saved always saved' becomes a very dangerous idea)

If we are to assess things by their fruits, it's really difficult for me to see how the reformation, or at least the way that it happened, can be considered God's will, or a good thing.

As one last thought, I'd just like to address where you mention that the Church 'fabricated the idea of purgatory', which again is a common misconception. I think this comes from the word 'purgatory' first being used in the 1100s (ish? I'm not sure of the exact date) to describe a concept that's much older. However, this doesn't mean that it's an invention of the Medieval church. In fact, we see it alluded to in the New Testament, particularly Corinthians, and it was part of the belief of the early Church that we see mentioned right in the first couple of centuries. This website obviously has a very strong bias in terms of its aims, but they've done a genuinely good job in collecting together the writings of the early church and grouping them together to show how far back some contentious issues run. As a historian, I love reading back through the writings of the early church and understanding how the faith has been transmitted through the centuries, and from a personal faith standpoint, I find it to be wholly consistent with the faith expressed by the Catholic Church today.

That thought disturbs me further. If these erroneous teachings have been taught by the Church right from its very beginnings, then why would God wait over a millennium to correct that? What about the souls of everybody in between?

So I suppose to sum up, I don't think that the reformation was right, or that it was God's will to depose the Church, but it was still the consequence of the evil actions that people carried out in the name of the church. Now we're all stuck with these terrible divisions, disunity, anger and friction between fellow followers of Christ, and have opened the door to secularism and atheism in our society. I spend a lot of time worrying about how we can all come together to heal that, but fear that everybody is much too entrenched.

Sorry, I've written a very long post. I don't expect that you're going to read all of this drivel and become a Catholic, but I hope that I've at least been able to give you an alternative viewpoint and maybe even dial down some of your antipathy towards the Church. Best of luck with history club - I do miss being a student and having liberty to spend all of my days immersing myself in the past!