Excellent point, I fully agree.
...... That said, aside from the Lutherans and the Anglicans, the rejection of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist took the very core out of the community and for this reason the Pope could say that Protestant groups are not strictly churches at all but rather “ecclesial groups”.
I don't understand this at all. Without the real presence, we still have a strong community. We just worship differently and under a different theology. Perhaps I am not missing what I have never known, but in terms of living faith, I see no superiority at all among the laity of any of the three groups over any other.
But within a generation, the centrality of the Eucharist, which both Calvin and Luther recognized, was gone, replaced by sola scriptura (in a way, I am convinced, that Luther certainly never intended).
Why do you think that sola scriptura REPLACED the Eucharist? Sola scriptura has to do with authority, and I am not aware that the Eucharist does. SS is not a method of worship.
“Perhaps I am not missing what I have never known, but in terms of living faith, I see no superiority at all among the laity of any of the three groups over any other.”
Superiority, FK, is not the issue at all. Its a matter of what The Church is. Read this as sort of an overview from a conservative Orthodox pov:
http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.11.en.the_ecclesiology_of_st._ignatius_of_antioch.01.htm