kosta: "Vicomte, we are a hairline apart but that hairline is a narrow, yet deep, deep canyon."
Yes, that is true.
And because a hairline is so narrow, however deep, the age is past when we should toss rocks at each other across it.
(The age never should have arisen in the first place...but "Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe unto the man by whom the offense cometh.")
If we should suppose that the Great Schism was just such an offense that, in the Providence of God, must needs come, and that the division it has left between us is a deep and abiding scar, the wound inflicted by the past on us is real. But we, alive in the hear and now, need not commit our own offenses of making the wounds worse. Catholics are not Protestants. We are a sacramental church based on ancient Tradition, in the Apostolic Succession going all the way back to Jesus, just like the Orthodox. Our differences are real, but they are not the difference between Protestants and Catholics. Those differences are real, but they are of a different order. It is possible to imagine a reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, with each coming into full communion with the other without the death of either Church. It is not possible to imagine, say, the Southern Baptist Convention coming into full communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople, without a complete change in the very nature of Southern Baptism itself.
Good point. Again, I say that referirng to "Protestants" is figurative and symbolic (i.e. protesting), and not realistic. We need not throw stones at each other. We need not call each other heretic, or by any other label. I agree fully.