Moronikos,
It just seems as if you have jumped ship from one extreme position to another.
My understanding is that you're a former Uniate. If that is so, could I not just as equally say you jumped from one indifferentistic/ecclessiologically mushy ship to another?
In the first case, it would have been traditional RCism with its narrow definition of the church, and now it is the ROAC. It seems to me to be two sides of the same coin.
Having had many occassions to speak with Juvenaly, and knowing his own personal history, I have seen important parallels in our mutual pasts, as well as differences.
One characteristic that I think can be discerned as being "true" of more doctrinal traditionalist Roman Catholics (as opposed to those who perhaps have some less well informed or more sentimental attachment to the old Latin rubrics and doctrinal formulations) that I have noticed, is that they tend to be reasoning people who understand that ideas/doctrines have real life consequences, both for how you live your life personally, and how the Church's discipline is formulated/express.
It is typically because of this consciousness, that such "trads" find their way out of "Vatican II" Catholicism, and into one of the various arms of the "Traditionalist Catholic" movement.
One dillema of course for all "traditionalst" Roman Catholics, is that in reality they are placing "Holy Tradition" above the contemporary magisterial authority of the Popes and those bishops loyal to them. They observe differences between the two (what they understand to be "holy tradition", and what contemporary Catholicism is about), and they choose. Of course, for some this creates a very understandable crisis of conscience, since like it or not, Papism is just that - it's entire ecclessiology is ultimatly "papal-centric". You really cannot be a "good papist" without the Pope, after all. For some, this leads to "sedevecantism" (those traditionalist RC's who solve these problems by simply denying there is a legitimate Pope right now...though this solution has problems of it's own)...but for a few fortunate others, it causes a deeper penetration of the subject of "tradition", the Church, and the history of Christendom.
For me, that deeper penetration (and an already, though only grudgingly admitted, positive experience of Orthodox dogmatics, Patristic thought, liturgy, etc.) contributed to my abandoning papism entirely. Simply put, Orthodoxy is the real "Catholic Traditionalism". Of course, all of these descriptions of my own journey (and what I can gather as being common in Juvenaly's) only explain the human dimension of these things, the removal of obsticals in the conscience and will so as to be humble before the uncreated Light, which shines upon all men.
While this subject as a whole is too broad (and in many ways, irrelevent to Orthodoxy) to be discussed here, let alone in this thread, I think Juvenaly would recognize the truthfulness of what I have said - and how it contributed to his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Not only this, but how it contributed to his by-passing the ecumenistic, anti-canonical fancies of the ecumenist "Orthodox", and sought out the "real thing." I think we were in a better position than many, to abandon sentimental attachments to our past, which very often add difficulties to those considering Orthodox Christianity (indeed, I think some make the decisions that they do, precisely because they are unwilling to renounce their former religions in a clear, unambiguous way.)
Are you the same Joseph Martinka that wrote a review of Michael Rose's "Goodby Good Men"? That Joseph Martinka wanted to become a Roman Catholic Priest and was rejected on mental grounds. That same Joseph Martinka then tried to join a monastic order, but was also rejected for about the same reasons, as far as I can tell.
For anyone unfamiliar with the real situation in the RCC right now, it is very common for anyone resembling a "conservative" or "traditional" believer, or even with strong sympathies in this direction, to be excluded from seminaries and religious institutions on "psychological grounds." Functionally, most of the RCC right now is a liberal-secularist wasteland; they seemed to by-pass protestantism entirely, and went and got comfy with secular-humanism. I've known many young men who were turned away from Novus-Ordo seminaries for "psychological reasons", largely because they didn't answer the leading questions of the diocesan examiner the way they wanted (on such issues as liturgy, homosexuality, opinion of non-Catholic religions, ordination of women, etc.)
Thus, getting called "crazy" by these people is almost essential; you should be worried if they don't think you're crackers.
I used to regularly talk to an RC priest from Quebec (he was the vice-rector of my parish at the time) about this. He rather sheepishly revealed that in truth, he had to spend his whole seminary "silent" so as to not give away his actual opinions on anything - for not only was there simply the danger of not being admitted to a seminary in the first place for having "old fashioned" views, but even being booted out at some point later on (typically by way of some woman "advisor" telling you they didn't think you "had a vocation".)
Seraphim
