First, does anyone care? Yes, millions do, with differing degrees of intensity.
Catholics, first. One faction cheers, because they are anti-ecumenical, consider Orthodox and Protestant members to be buzzing insects that distract Catholics who must swat them. Or, more charitably, because they fear that ecumenism portends relativism, and Catholic truth too easily gets given away. Another faction has begun to speak up in criticism, seeing it as an abrasive, arrogant, mistimed, and itself distracting word at a time when people of faith ought to pull together against common enemies. No doubt between them are most Catholics who more or less have always taken for granted what the Pope said of the Church and Everybody Else, but will not be stirred or alienated: they know Christian neighbors who seem to be doing far more than "playing at church" in ecclesial communities. I'd add a fourth element: those who are enraged by such expressions and think that "it's the same old Ratzinger," the old Inquisitor speaking up, but who hold their fire, in charity and so as not to alienate Rome.
As for non-Catholic Christians: many will say of the claim that this is nothing new; it's on the books, and even shows up in the Second Vatican Council's generous document Nostra Aetate. After that document was passed, there was much cheer: it certainly did not give up the claims to unique truth in Catholicism, but its spirit was generous as it reached with varying degrees of openness to Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, and even Hinduism and Buddhism, as I recall. No one then or now expects the pope to say that Catholicism is "pretty good" at heart, in respect to truth. The problem this time was not the positive claim but the negative stress on how non-Catholic Christians cannot be church, or the church, or part of the church, or an expression of the church. What they do looks like the real thing, but is inauthentic, like playing church. It's a little bit like saying that "we" who married by priests in the apostolic succession are really married, while the rest of you, well-intended though you may be, are living together not in real marriage. This judgment does show up in annulments.
I'll be in the company of those who believes that in the most recent century for all ecumenicalliy-minded Christians and for the most recent half-century since Vatican II (1962-1965) there have been many ups and downs (and levels), and if this is a "down" day or year or pontificate, they take the long view--and many cheer the "up" days of Benedict XVI when he writes an encyclical about love and a book about Jesus. And the Orthodox and the Protestants who receive the bread and wine, "the body and blood" of Christ at Anglican, Lutheran, Orthodox, and so many other altars, will be fully convinced that they are fully church, and that Christ is fully present and they will be fully graced. Some of them, when they come to the words in the Creed about the qualities of the church might mentally translate so that THEY are the ones who include the Roman Catholic Church, their brothers and sisters. They might adopt the Pope's word for them, and give it back: "I believe in one, holy, catholic, apostolic "set of ecclesial communities."
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