I'm sure they appreciate acts of charity. I hope you are not equating heretics to those that disagree with you/your church. The thread so far has been interesting and has not degenerated into some of the name calling I have seen in the past.It is actually a good exercise for all sides to defend ones beliefs to examine whether you still believe in what you say or repeat what you have been told/taught or you enjoy beating ones adversaries down for guilty pleasure.
That's a keeper there. chuckle.
Largely, I do. Remember though that heretic means "one who disagrees with the Catholic Church". It is not a swear word, it is a technical term that I apply in its primary meaning.
Protestantism is heresy.
Now, there is a finer point sometimes made: that there is a difference between informed heretic -- one who sticks to a heresy while fully informed of both the correct teaching and the nature of the heresy, -- and a follower of a heresy who never had a chance or desire to learn and make an informed judgement.
This difference speaks to the culpability of an individual believer. The informed heretic leads into heresy; the uninformed one merely follows. But the belief is still either is or is not heretical. The moral obligation is still on the uninformed heretic to get himself better informed.
In America, as in most majority-protestant countries, it is difficult to become fully informed of the heretical nature of Protestantism, since it is only the Church that would be doing the teaching. The Church, however, is caricatured to the point beyond all recognition. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said on his TV program, (I paraphrase), very few Protestants disagree with the Catholic Church. Nearly all, however, disagree with what they think the Catohlic Church teaches. The problem is, the Catholic Church also disagrees with what the Protestants think the Catholic Church teaches. Since then, things went significantly downhill: it is hard to imagine a Catholic bishop having a regularly scheduled program on a major TV network today, while American society is on its way to losing its Christian character altogether.
Very often, in the process of conversion, the convert says: -- "How is this theology Catholic? I always believed that!"
So, to summarize, when I call someone whom I barely know a heretic, I of course have no way of knowing how well informed his adherence to the heresy is. If a conversation develops, for example, on FR, I often see great commonality of intuitive Catholic belief, -- that would be because Protestantism exists on a Catholic foundation, -- and I see a fierce resistance to a few poorly understood sticking points. So for the most part these are not well informed heretics, they just hold to heretical beliefs.