Any answer to this question will be a massive generalization, because human beings in different times and places will have had their own personal opinions. That said, I think there may be too much emphasis placed on Medieval Roman Catholicism as "bad." This is largely due to Ango-American textbooks that adopted Protestant assumptions about the corruption of the Catholic Church.

In his absolutely wonderful book The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch argues convincingly that Medieval Catholicism was much less stilted and far more vibrant than most assume:

The liturgy of of the Mass was not only good for the soul...it was fun. German Christians for instance, looked forward on Easter morning to a good time celebrating Christ's harrowing of hell... At Hof in Upper Franconia a solemn procession with a cricifix customarily tried to make its way out of the church, only to find its path batted by a crowd of local youths dresses as devils. After a serious of ritual challenges and a vigorous mock fight...the devils fled the scene, throwing down their flaming torches. At the Holy Spirit's festival on Whitsuntide in the Bavarian diocese of Eichstadt, a carved wooded dove of the Spirit was lowered down on the congregation through a hold in the church roof-vaulting...the dove was closely followed by bucketfuls of water, and the member of the congregation most thoroughly soaked became the town's Pfingstvogel (Whitsun Bird) for the coming year.

In addition, you have to remember that religion was as much a cultural identity as it was intellectual or dogmatic. At the time of the Reformation Europe was terribly threatened by the Ottomans, who sieged Vienna in 1529. And Castille only finished the reconquista, the removal of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, in 1492. In other words, the Muslim conquest of North Africa and the Middle East was a huge concern to European monarchs who viewed it (particularly the Ottomans) as an existential threat.

In addition, African corsairs widely attacked and raided European towns in order to acquire slaves.

Modern historians examining contemporary comment produce reliable estimates that Islamic raiders enslaved around a million western Christian Europeans between 1530 and 1640; this dwarfs the contemporary slave traffic in the other direction, and is about equivalent to the numbers of west Africans taken by Christian Europeans across the Atlantic at the same time.

Just let that sink it for a minute. Europeans were humiliated and disturbed the audacity of these raids. In fact, the problem was so bad that there were religious orders that specialized in ransoming slaves from Muslim states. This anxiety, and threat, helped affirm European ideas of "Christendom," in contrast the Muslim world, and was a phenomenon as much political as it was religious.

(Source, MacCulloch The Reformation, p. 24 and p. 57)