We are a barbarian land. This is not a historically Orthodox country, and the population is not a majority Orthodox.
We are a diaspora Church. Russian, Serbian, Arab, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Albanian, etc.: there are a few Western Rites. Even those parishes and jurisdictions that are mostly-English or all-English are transparently, if not self-consciously (*cough* OCA), inheritors of one of these traditions. That there has been no attempt, as with the Byzantine mission to the Slavs, to translate the Church's heritage into a cultural idiom appropriate to the various regions of the U.S. (with Alaska the sole exception), it is clear that Orthodoxy in the U.S. is not a mission phenomenon, but a diaspora phenomenon. We are a diaspora Church, no matter how many generations into the diaspora we go. There is no way to avoid this. Succeeding generations of American-borne ethnics will not change this. Neither will a steady influx of converts.
When Anglo-Celts stop naming their chilren after Russian and Greek saints to the neglect of their native traditions, and Churches in the U.K. and the U.S. are dedicated to Anglo-Celtic saints, then we'll have some initial movement to approach becoming a local Church.
The fact that converts willfully give up on this matter -- and that those spouses, who do not want to give up on naming their children according to saints that are part of the local cultural heritage, usually concede to their (sometimes ethnic, sometimes not) spouse who do -- this is not a mark of the Catholic Church, but of an ethnic sect, an exotic bird. And locals, even if they get their Divine Liturgies in English, are being assimilated.
Unless the Orthodox Church can accomodate other cultural histories other than the ancestral lands that the Churches come from -- especially when these cultural histories are Christian -- it can never claim to be Catholic.
I do not want to be a distracting Celtic sideshow in an exotic bird zoo.
