Politics politics politics. And, IIRC, the “sacking of Rome” was done by mutinous troops.
Somebody knows their way around Wikipedia. But the attacks on Italy were not unofficial – they were a direct attack on the Papal States. Pope Clement tried to drive Charles V out of Italy, and Charles V fought back. The Church hadn’t had secular power over Christendom since the Council of Florence dissolved in 1449. Europe no longer was what it was in 1215 and you can’t expect the pope to have been able to just command the kings to do what he wanted and expect them to obey. (That, I think, is why the papal reforms of the Spanish Inquisition largely failed.)
Also, to get back more to the point, the same document I quoted above (where the Pope says we should be showing mercy and not punishment) goes on to declare that any Inquisition suspects can appeal the decisions of Torquemada et. al. and they will be heard by the Papal courts. That is a serious reform in line with the kind of power you are thinking should be there, though I don’t think Spain let it happen.
Good effort (I mean the homemade timeline), but I really don’t think there’d be much more of substance in the gap. Except, perhaps, for some rather unpleasant incidents in not-lamented Papal States.
I think there would be, because I already know of some papal documents that reflect modern (and Renaissance) ideas about human liberty and inalienable rights. For example, I could add a date for 1537, when Pope Paul III said: “We define and declare by these Our letters…that [American Indians] are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.”
Now that is almost what we would expect a modernist to say. If one were to assess the content of that document in terms of religious liberty, it would be fair to say that it declares that a person’s paganism doesn’t give them fewer rights than Christians, and, due to its reliance on the School of Salamanca, it’s fair to say that this bases the conception of liberty (including in religious affairs) in universal human nature.
After the 1500s we see the Church sending out missionaries to China, America, India, and the newly-Protestantized nations. I very much doubt that St. Isaac Jogues in America and St. Francis Xavier in China went about force-converting anybody, because they were severely outnumbered and would be killed if they tried. And I’ll bet that if you examine their writings, or the writings of the systematic theologians who discussed the Missions from a speculative level, they would tell you why – and it wouldn’t just be, “Because they would die.” It would be because faith is a free act, etc. Thus we may expect to find reflections during the 1600s and early 1700s as well.
In the 1800s you find men like St. John Henry Newman, who insisted on religious liberty and defended the Church’s traditional teaching on the subject when men were attacking the Church over the Syllabus of Errors, which seemed to condemn the idea. But the popes and saints of that time knew better, and no one doubts that once Pope Leo XIII came into office, we find ever more explicit commendations of ideas like religious liberty, social justice, etc. (In fact, he explicitly clarified that the Syllabus of Errors does not condemn rulers who allow religious liberty. And he was the immediate successor of the pope who initiated that controversy in the first place.)
In sum, I think if you examine the period between 1500 and 1800, there is ample material from which I would expect a Catholic defense of religious liberty (if only it were translated!), and there are certainly ample examples of it from 1800 forward.
Humour is the best antidote to those whose ideas on Christian-Jewish relations are still stuck around 1,000 or more years ago.