[Cronos]

Shame on you. I found that statement very accurate. Catholics were the "protestants" to the Orthodox - it is they who protested and changed Orthodox doctrine and left the Church. I have made this case many a time on here in the past.

The Catholic church did not "leave" some mother church, the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicated each other -- it was a mutual dissolution, not the case of a branch splitting off as was the case for Protestantism. The Pope was not 'under' the Patriarch of Constantinople like the bishops in WEstphalia were 'under' the Pope. Hence the analogy is silly and very much an oversimplification. We have pages of debates here on the forum trying to describe exactly what happens and you agree with a simple one-liner? Quite incorrect Destro, quite incorrect.

[Kolokotronis]

Cronos is right, Destro. We are in Schism. Were it not for the innovations which we hold the Roman Church has instituted without the "imprimatur" of an Ecumenical Council, the lifting of the mutual anathemas of the of the Great Schism by the Pope and the EP, we might well be One Church in the West and the East by now. A Great and Holy Council of the Church, with both Rome and the East present might be able to review the innovations which the West (and to a lesser extent the local councils of the East) since the 7th Ecumenical Council have advanced. Protestants, in the main, are true heretics, affirmatively rejecting various teachings of the 7 Ecumenical Councils and teaching new revelations of the Faith. Romans, from our pov are not heretics or Protestants nor are we to them, the opinions of individuals in both Churches to the contrary notwithstanding.

I am in no position to comment upon the RCs who claim we are heretics or the first Protestants. I am, however, in a position to observe that the Eastern Church, especially here in America, has in the relatively recent past been subject to a low level anti-Catholicism coming from Protestant converts to the Faith who, while sometimes quite vociferously rejecting their former error, nevertheless hold tight to a particularly nativist American anti-Catholicism. I say "nativist" because this sentiment raises its ugly head in an anti "cradle orthodox" attitude which was stunningly revealed by Frank Schaeffer's writings in his publication "The Christian Activist" during the great Archbishop Spyridon controversy in the GOA of some years ago. The worst epithet these fundy converts can throw at a Church is to call it "Protestant". This attitude is wholly un-Orthodox and indeed may be an example of the heresy of Phyletism.