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You have an internal contradiction in this statement.

(1) The Catholics agree with the Bible that the words of Jesus are "the words of eternal life.
(2) The Catholics take these words to mean what they say ("my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed") and don't reach for hidden meanings to the opposite.
(3) What the Protestants do or think is of little interest to me. If I, now or in the future, inaccurately describe what one Protestant group thinks because I confuse it with some other Protestant group, take it to the extent it applies to your particular group. But I don't think you take the discourse about "flesh is meat indeed" literally, ad so at least on that part I correctly said "you don't take these passages in John 6 as words of eternal life". I am proceeding with your theory in the sequel of your post.

His confession in response to this teaching was not that he believed something about the transformed nature of bread and wine, but that he believed something about Jesus

You build up a dichotomy that does not exist in the text. The preceding discourse is in great part about Jesus going to give then His flesh to eat, and Peter did not differentiate which part of Jesus speech is "words of eternal life" and which are not. He simply took all of it. That is the Catholic attitude as well: we are not asked to be theologians alongside St. Thomas, but we are asked to take Christ's words on faith even when they are "hard teaching".

Moreover, your attempt to separate Peter's faith in Jesus as the Messiah from Peter's faith in the words of Jesus about the Eucharist contradicts the flow of the conversation between Jesus and Peter. The flow is: many disciples were bothered by Jesus giving them His flesh - many disciples left - Jesus asks Peter if he would leave - Peter confesses. The dispute was about the nature of the Eucharist and the confession of Peter in John 6:69 must not be separated from this context. Unless, again, you don't care about the words Christ spoke and the evangelists recorded.

It's simply not there

He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. (John 6:55)
Take ye, and eat. This is my body Matthew 26:26, all synoptics have something similar)
he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord. (1 Cor. 11:29)

That is what's there.

even the metaphor of consuming Him by having faith in Him is real.

Metaphors are perhaps "real" in some textual sense (for example Aesop's fables are real not because the turtle really raced the hare but because Aesop really wrote the fable pointing to some recognizable realities in humans). But in the Bible on the subject of the nature of the Eucharist there is no metaphor expressed anywhere, for Christ insisted on "my body is meet indeed" and many disciples disputed it and left over it. People don't leave over metaphors, and they gave Jesus every opportunity to clarify. Neither the speech at the Last Supper sounds like anything other than a statement of fact; neither St. Paul would be threatening people with spiritual death over a metaphor.

a spiritual event that could not be reduced to a loveless food orgy

Fighting your own imagination here. While Eucharist is food to be eaten, the Catholic teaching is that it nourishes the spirit. Visit a Mass one day and tell me if you see any orgy.

But I don't think you take the discourse about "flesh is meat indeed" literally, ad so at least on that part I correctly said "you don't take these passages in John 6 as words of eternal life".

There is no requirement that we abandon the ordinary use of direct metaphor to believe what Jesus is teaching in John 6. The fact is, the fair weather followers of Jesus who abandoned Him in John 6 did so precisely because they rejected the metaphor and went to a literal sense. That literal sense jarred them because it seemed to go against Moses. They didn't have enough faith in Him personally to realize He would never lead them into rejecting the divine law. They didn't have enough faith to realize that when He was gone back to Heaven, they would have still been able to continue feeding on Him by faith, simply by believing on Him, and feeding on His words.

Therefore you are not correct. Jesus in this passage does not insist on "literal" meaning for spiritual teaching, but rather confirms the opposite.

(2) The Catholics take these words to mean what they say ("my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed") and don't reach for hidden meanings to the opposite.

The spiritual meaning is not hidden at all. As I have said repeatedly, Jesus states explicitly He is teaching about faith in Himself, and at a spiritual not a fleshly level. And Peter demonstrates the right response at the end of the discourse, not in an effort to literally eat Jesus, or to secure transformed bread and wine, but from out of his heart proclaim his faith in God's chosen Messiah. The meaning, so far from being hidden, could not be more plain if it were written across all the starry host, "come to Jesus, and you will hunger no more, believe on Jesus, and you will never thirst again."

But those who wanted to understand him literally, because after all, the fishes and loaves were literal, they were blinded by their literalism. It was their literalism that drove them to reject the words that might have led them to eternal life.

we are not asked to be theologians alongside St. Thomas, but we are asked to take Christ's words on faith even when they are "hard teaching".

And indeed it was very hard teaching. The rabbinical teachers had concocted various stories of how Messiah when He came would provide literal bounty, literal freedom from oppressors such as Rome, a literal and outward kingdom that the power brokers could walk into with all their worldly glory, yet with uncircumcised hearts. Messianic utopia without the new birth that changes a person from the heart. This sort of literalism was a dodge, a way to avoid the pain of remorse for sin. It was central to the spiritual problem of the Pharisees. Outwardly, they were lovely tombs, but inside was the stench of death. Throughout all of Jesus' ministry, He is teaching by parable, by metaphor, about truths that get past the superficial outside, and cut down into the deepest parts of the human heart, where the real problem resides. It is a spiritual matter, and it always has been.

And that is what made Jesus' teaching so hard. On the heels of one of the most spectacular and game-changing physical miracles in human history, a miracle that promised the elimination of hunger for all time, He turns it upside down and drives them to think about the true hunger all men and women face. What will satisfy that? Fishes and loaves? No literal food can satisfy a spiritual hunger such as that. But those who ingest Jesus by faith, who feed on every word that proceeds from His mouth, their hunger will be satisfied. He is the manna from Heaven, but He can only be consumed by faith. It is not enough to tag along for the miracles. There must be a change of heart.

It was too big a shift for most of them. They refused to see it in spiritual terms. All they had left was the literal, and they couldn't figure out how that could work. Yet there was Peter, to whom the Father had revealed the Son, demonstrating the very faith of which Jesus speaks. Hard, yes, but all things are possible with God.

Peace,

SR