You should read an older history of this series of events; past views of the inquisition were vastly different than the present view. For a long time, it was seen as a humane thing due to their use of an actual legal process rather than people and local strong men burning heretics (who were probably mostly "heretics") at random. In other words, the inquisition was a Church reform designed to mitigate "private sector" witch hunters who were causing political upheaval. The use of standards of evidence by people like Bernard Gui (who wrote a manual on the subject) was a big innovation, as silly as it might seem today.
My historical point of comparison is the events leading up to the various religious wars. The protestant reformation unleashed historical and cultural forces in the same way the present slow motion destruction of the last 100 years of political consensus.