I might have joined the RCC as I was considering it when two things happened that caused me to become Orthodox when my traditionalist friend Fr. Steven retired from the Episcopal Church, namely, the unexpected retirement of Pope Benedict XVI, memory eternal, and the abduction of the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop and the Antiochian Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo while the two were riding back from Lebanon in a car. I had always been fascinated with Orthodoxy, and had grieved for the Serbian Orthodox and Allbanian Orthodox Christians in Kosovo who were persecuted over a decade previously, and during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 I was greatly upset, and in my youth the Soviet Union and its repression of Orthodox and other Christians was very much in my mind, and the subsequent suffering of those same Christians in the economic collapse that followed the political collapse of the Soviet regime.
But I think Orthodox Catholic - Roman Catholic reconciliation is extremely important, although first I believe that the reunification of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, which is in progress, but naturally takes a long time and is not helped by the inaccurate information about the OOs posted by schismatic Old Calendarists on sites like orthodoxinfo.com (they are unaware that ancient Monophysitism is extinct, and the beliefs of the Oriental Orthodox as demonstrated through their worship is the same as ours, indeed, the hymn Ho Monogenes was most likely written by St. Severus of Antioch and added to the liturgy by Emperor Justinian, who married a Syriac Orthodox woman, St. Theodora, venerated in both communions (the Eastern Orthodox venerate her for her piety and the Oriental Orthodox venerate her for advising St. Jacob bar Addai that the Imperial authorities were arresting and perhaps executing all of the Miaphysite bishops of Antioch, of whom he alone survived or remained free, and ordained hundreds of bishops acting sola, which is allowed in emergency conditions, which made it impossible for the Syriac church to be decapitated. The belief that St. Athanasius wrote Ho Monogenes is most likely of Armenian origin, as the Armenians rival the Copts and Ethiopians for their veneration of St. Athanasius, and had a schism with the Syriac Orthodox and apparently are the only Oriental Orthodox church where St. Severus is not widely venerated (and was for a time regarded as heterodox).
However, it seems possible that Roman Catholic - Assyrian, or rather I should say Chaldean Catholic - Assyrian relations could begin sooner; an initial advance was rebuffed by the Holy Synod of the Assyrian Church of the East because of concerns that it would mean the end of their autocephalous status, which they have enjoyed de facto since the evangelization of the Ephesus to Kerala, India trade route by Saints Thomas, Addai and Mari in the first century (as an autonomous church under the Patriarch of Antioch, and later as a fully independent and autocephalous church responsible for all territories beyond the Eastern border of the Roman Empire, streching to Socotra off the coast of Yemen in the Southwest, Urmia and Merv in the Northwest, and to Mongolia in the Northeast, and Tibet in the Southeast, with major population centers in the Nineveh Plains, Seleucia-Cstesiphon, near Old Babylon and modern day Baghdad, and Kerala. Indeed the Chaldean Catholics are members of an Assyrian tribe, the Chaldinaya, Arabic speaking Assyrians chiefly in the city of Baghdad.
Thus we have the question of preserving the autocephalous status our churches are assured under Canons 6 and 7 of the Council of Nicaea in the case of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, and other canons in the case of Cyprus and constantinople, and by extension, all other autocephalous churches (since if Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople have the same authority as Rome in their jurisidictions, that includes the authority to organize new autonomous and autocephalous churches, although lately the current Greek Orthodox Archbishop of North America became notorious as Metropolitan of Bursa (which under his tenure went from an actual Metropolis with one church to a titular Metropolis with no churches, which is unfortunate since Bursa is approximately where Chalcedon was, and there were 15 or so members at the remaining Orthodox church there), by claiming that only the Ecumenical Patriarchate has the power to grant, and even more controversly, to revoke, autocephaly (indeed the controversial tomos of autocephaly granted to the OCU in 2018 appears to give the EP this ability), but it is the case that Constantinople refuses to recognize the autocephalous status of the Orthodox Church in America, despite the OCA having been granted autocephaly in 1970 by the MP.
There is also the important question of the liturgy - from an Orthodox perspective the Novus Ordo Missae comes across as being a bit too close to the liturgies of the mainline churches, often lacking the elements of the ars celebrandi which some dismiss as “bells and smells” which characterize the Traditional Latin Mass and contibute so much to the liturgical beauty of the Orthodox churches and indeed most of the Eastern Rite Catholics, with the exception of the Maronites and some of the Mar Thoma churches (indeed I have even seen celebration versus populum in a Chaldean Catholic church, which would not be something the Assyrians would want to see). Among Byzantine Rite Catholics, paradoxically, in North America the Ukrainian Greek Catholics have liturgy that is less Latinized and in some cases closer to the Ukrainian Orthodox liturgy of the UOC and the UOC-KP than the worship of the OCU, which has adopted the Byzantine style phelonion (a cope-like chasuble) instead of the high-cut Athonite phelonions traditionally used in Ukraine (one of the three main varieties, along with the Athonite phelonion used on Mount Athos and in Russia, Belarus, the Church of Finland (also under the EP) and the Slavonic parishes of the OCA, and the Byzantine Phelonion which lacks the raised collar and is draped over the shoulders like the Western cope, the Gothic-style chasuble or the Syriac Orthodox phayno (and its Maronite equivalent).
