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Certainly they can, for the same reason that you can proudly attend a Church that has done the same. Individual responsibility protects you from culpability in the sins and poor policy choices of your denomination as much as they can selectively ignore policy choices hundreds of years prior.
Particularly if we acknowledge that many theological disagreements of centuries were past were not purely of a theological nature, but often proxies for the more secular political disagreements and conflicts of the era. The Catholic Church was a religious domination. It was also a highly influential, and not-so-rarely highly intrusive, political institution at all levels of European society with complex relationships across the political hierarchies. These were not mere trivialities, but a central dynamic of the social order. Theological disputes not-so-rarely following along those lines is just a consequence of the culture war of its era. Many of the fractures not just of protestantism from catholicism, but within protestantism itself, derive from the widespread awareness of secular corruption and abuses cloaked in Church authority.
Again, sectarian shittalking is fine as it goes. But if you want to pin poor policies of the past to people who weren't there to influence them, they (and anyone else) can do the same for you. Splinters and logs and all that.
But just saying, as a far outside observe, if I were forced to guess who had the better insight into heaven between a denomination that threw the baby out with the bathwater, or a denomination responsible for the inquisition, crusades, and- in its more noble, modern institutional form, pedophile priests...
Well, if I did have to make the guess under the premise that adherents are accountable to the failings of their clergy centuries before, it would be an incredibly easy decision.
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