I’m not Christian. I was raised culturally Catholic but never practiced or believed in the Christian God. I’ve been excomunicated for a few years too. I have no connection to the Catholic in any form (except maybe some of their money funding some political stuff I do).

The Catholic Church, understood as the community of believers, is an organization going on for thousands of years, in every corner of the world, involving a few billions of humans. Every organization of that size will have stains in its history, especially if you judge them from the perspective of late-stage modernity morals, which the Church deliberately doesn’t participate in. They have their own system, and it clashes with the rationalist mindset because both systems have a claim to universalism, with the Christian universalism creating the modern colonial-scientific universalism. They are two sides of the same coin. I make little distinction between the two, because both eventually lead to oppression. That said, nowadays the Catholic Church is positioning itself as the main leader of the anti-fascist front in the Global North.

Also little historical note: quantitatively, the vast majority of witch burnings were done by protestants, not by catholics