The Orthodox in this country seem to facing many of the same hurdles Catholics faced 100 years ago. Then, Roman Catholicism transformed from a largely immigrant church to a mainstream church as the immigrants who formed its backbone blended into American culture. The Orthodox face similar challenges. More and more parishes are slowly (and in many cases begrudgingly) conducting the Liturgy in English (albeit with a strong accent) rather than Russian, Greek, or Old Church Slavonic. Furthermore, more and more clergy are not only from America, but are also being trained in America (St. Tikhon's, Holy Cross, etc.). Parishioners are no longer seeing themsleves as Bulgarian/Romanian/Antiochan/Coptic/etc. Orthodox Christians living in America, but as American Orthodox Christians.
"The Orthodox in this country seem to facing many of the same hurdles Catholics faced 100 years ago. Then, Roman Catholicism transformed from a largely immigrant church to a mainstream church as the immigrants who formed its backbone blended into American culture."
There is one huge difference, and that difference enormously strengthened the Catholic Church. 100 years ago, anti-Catholic sentiment was bitter and aggressive. That was the pinnacle era of "Birth of a Nation" Ku Klux Klan ideology. The public schools in many states taught religion, and intentionally and aggressively taught an anti-Catholic bias, requiring children to participate in explicitly Protestant prayers, etc. It was because of this malicious persecution that the Catholic Church in America responded by declaring the Catholic School system, that each diocese and parish should create its own schools.
The Catholic-haters in several states responded by passing laws making private religious education ILLEGAL, and REQUIRING students to attend the public schools.
The Supreme Court struck down those laws.
Anyway, the point is that the all of that nastiness and malevolence actually HELPED the Catholic Church, because by singling out Catholics for special, negative treatment, the backlash was that Catholics made a universal school system for Catholics, something that does not really exist to that degree and depth in other countries. Because the Catholics were quite numerous already, and made up of a bunch of Irish, Poles, Germans and Italians - not people who are characteristically meek or retiring, but who are stubborn as hell - when the Protestant establishment attempted to use the law to act out its anti-Catholic bias, the result was a degree of mobilization and militancy in the Roman Catholic Church that would have never been achieved without the persecution.
That turned out to be an advantage to Catholicism, because it gave Catholics battle scars and made them stick together to stick in in their opponents' eye.
By contrast, nobody is persecuting the Orthodox. In truth, before recently, about the only people who knew what Orthodoxy was were either living in a few ethnic neighborhoods in a couple of immigration cities, or Catholics who had been through Catholic School and had Church history. Orthodoxy is a "below the radar screen" sort of thing. One can sometimes still see idiots cook off somewhere and put up a billboard like the clowns who put up a "Nazi Pope" sign out in Washington a couple of years ago. There's still some residual anti-Catholic bile out there in the fever swamps. (We even see some of it here on the FR religion pages sometimes.)
But it's just not imaginable that anybody is going to put up a billboard of the Ecumenical Patriarch or start fulminating on air somewhere about how Onion Domes and icons are all concealment for the Whore of Babylon.
So, unfortunately for the Orthodox, they don't have the luxury of having the same really mean and really stupid enemies that the Catholics faced 100 years ago to unite them. Who hates the Orthodox? Anybody likely to realize that you, too, are the "Whore of Babylon" that needs to be hated and feared is too ignorant to know you exist in the first place. Sad but true.
And so you face different hurdles.
The first is the LACK of a really unifying enemy, which Catholics had the luxury of having.
And the second is division among yourselves which is one thing that Catholics lack.