Catholics in 1066: "No, unfailing devotion to the Pope is required. He is not 'First among equals', he is the leader of the One Holy Church, and the Patriarch of Constantinople must be excommunicated for his arrogance in claiming equality to Rome."
Catholics in 1541: "No! No salvation through faith alone, no rejecting the authority of the church: refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Pope is unacceptable, and for this, we excommunicate Martin Luther and his followers. Rejection of the ultimate authority of the Pope and the clergy led by him is in essence rejection of Christendom and must be treated as such."
Catholics in 2020: "Well you see the Pope is more of a Spiritual Leader you aren't supposed to literally obey things he says, it's a suggestion; religious guidance, open to interpretation you see."
I haven't read back beyond this post which is the first on the page, but there's definitely an interplay between religion and power there, and not just in the Catholics. When you can no longer force them to obey, the rhetoric changes and it's all sunshine and flower power. For example, you had the whole Tibetan buddhist torture/mutilation stuff until fairly recently.
Judicial mutilation – principally the gouging out of eyes, and the cutting off of hands or feet – was formalized under the Sakya school as part of the 13th century Tibetan legal code, and was used as a legal punishment until being declared illegal in 1913 by a proclamation of the 13th Dalai Lama.
So, in 1913 they banned cutting people's eyes out and stuff. But by any sort of reasonable interpretation, you wouldn't assume that such a brutal system magically turns into wine and roses because the leader banned them from doing the worst stuff. Sure, they banned cutting bits off people, but I'm pretty sure that some fairly nasty shit still going on after that: if you're doing that stuff and it's banned, then you work out the nastiest stuff you can continue to do and still get away with it. Once they were out of power (the Chinese being no better), they've rebranded in a similar way to the Catholics. And gaslighting heavily as to the history. Buddhism is widely known for their peace and tolerance: everywhere they're
not in power, and it's largely the fact that they're in power almost nowhere that they have that reputation. See counter-example of Myanmar. It's one of the only nations where Buddhists are actually in power and they "somehow" are doing nasty genocide shit. EDIT: well you might say "Bhutan is nice and they're Buddhist" however one of the first things I read on the Wikipedia page just now was about ethnic cleansing accusations.
See Richard Dawkins pointing out that on almost all fronts, the official religion lags behind improved public morals, for example slavery, rather than being ahead of the curve. The pope's gay marriage announcement is actually a direct example of Dawkin's point.