Brethren, Peace and Good to all of you.
I want to share with you the more definitive reasons that led to my return to the Catholic Church.
First, a very personal admission: I left the Catholic Church and joined the Orthodox Church because I thought I had a priestly vocation and that the Catholic Church was arbitrarily denying it to me.
I make this admission in order to atone for what I did against both Churches, and not for any wish for moral grand standing.
Of course, I didn't put the reason for my departure quite clearly to myself. I told myself that the Orthodox faith and spirituality were more "organic" and more consonant with the early Church and the apostolic faith; that the Catholic Church had deviated from early ecclesiology and that the Roman primacy of jurisdiction was a false claim; that the Catholic Church had become too modernistic, having compromised with the spirit of the age; too rationalistic, minimalist, rubrical, etc. etc. And of course, too involved with the notion of sex as impure to allow its secular priests the option to marry before ordination as the Orthodox do.
Once my eyes were open to my own conceit, I took another look. In many instances, the Orthodox had a mirror image history to the Latin Church: too much compromised to politics, secular and ecclesiastical, guilty of its own kind of triumphalism. Also, in it's most acerbic quarters, its own kind of anti-Semitism.
I discovered also that the logical end of becoming a "good Orthodox" was to become fiercely anti-Catholic, condescending toward them, etc. "Poor Catholics,they just don't know"! My soul became to darken with the passions the best of them warned me about. I also looked at the civilization the Orthodox had created and their descendants. Like ours, it had good things and bad, but I also felt that it led to a further darkening of the intellect. "Credo et intelligam" means something different in the East, a pursuit of mystery for its own sake. Yes, God is the ultimate Mystery and He is an end in Himself but the familiarity that moved me to call Him "Abba" was gone. Mystery without intimacy, no wonder many of their authorities mock Sts. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and other Catholic contemplatives as “immature” and “beginners” in the ways of prayer, as compared to Eastern luminaries. If I can see the heroic holiness of Orthodox saints, why can’t they see that granted to our own men and women?
And what if being Orthodox is not enough, but that I also must become Old Calendarist, in righteous disobedience to canonical Orthodoxy? – I asked myself. How far in additional assents and denials must I had to endure to reach the elusive goal of a pure, primitive Christianity? Heck, the Protestants embarked on the same project. In the last analysis, I wasn't much different from them, wasn't I?
I also discovered that men who become priests, Catholics as well as Orthodox, are very special men, to whom God granted an awesome grace, and I wasn't one of them.
My hubris was laid bare before me. I didn't like what I saw.
Once I understood my own conceit, I came to recognize that my conversion to Orthodoxy was, predicated from the wrong premises. I had built on sand. I had to return to my Church and be quiet in mind and spirit for a while, and start again with a tested, adult faith.
Yes, there were little things, little brushes here and there that pointed the way back to the Catholic Church. But these were secondary causes, all tied to the first one: my own hubris.
There you have it: I sinned by leaving the One, True Church for the One, True Church, equally beautiful and equally flawed, then I sinned again by going in reverse. In the great scheme of things, I barely moved but in that movement, I became a man of adult, Catholic and Orthodox faith, the division between them healed within my soul.
This fact may sound confusing to many Catholics and absurd to many Orthodox, but that’s the way it is. This is the way God brought out good from my faults.
Finally, my experience may help others in their own walk, and not only those who are considering switching Churches: be fully conscious of why you do things. Don’t deceive yourself with rationalizations. Let the motivations for all your actions be transparent to yourself. That way you will learn to distinguish good from evil more distinctly and avoid actions you may later regret, when you’ve also hurt a lot of people.
May the thrice-holy, all-merciful God, Father, Son, and + Holy Spirit forgive us our sins and bless us all. Amen.