"You were doing so well! Is it necessary to throw in such comments?"
Sorry, but, theological reality aside, that's just what it looked like, even to us in the East 100 years earlier. When the Eastern hierarchs came back to Constantinople from the Council of Florence, the reaction of the lower clergy and laity, both high and low born, was that they and the Empire had been delivered into the hands of "foreign overlords", not the loving embrace of the HMC. Quite aside from the sensitivities of the Protestants, there's a lesson here for Rome to remember as the discussions continue between Orthodoxy and the Latin Church.
And tell me how exactly the "lower clergy" were able to ascertain that? Are you saying that there was not some bias already ingrained against the Pope by this time (Florence) and any rebuilding was doomed to failure because of the "lower clergy's" attitudes? Are we to believe that these men really knew what Rome was teaching?
I think 300 years of separation had ingrained a number of half truths and twistings of what the West was really doing. They hadn't ANY experience with the Western world - it is a dream to believe these "lower clergy" refused Rome because they had some inner "feeling" based on actual experience that it was wrong to reunite with the West because the West had actually fallen off the rails...
Let's be honest. There was a massive anti-West movement in the East during the time. Florence was doomed because of that, not because of theology.
Regards