I think that you are missing a much bigger picture with respect to the whole issue of ecumenism and ecclesiastical structures. Historically, the Catholic Church has always provided a vehicle for reconciliation of separated Christians that has substantially preserved their ecclesial structures, leadership, and liturgical traditions, and pastoral practice.I know too little about Eastern rite Catholics to make an effective response, but this prompted an exchange with my regular correspondent, who points out,Throughout the later middle ages, the Catholic Church welcomed many dioceses from other communions or churches into full communion. These bodies became the founding cores of the present "sui juris" ritual churches, each of which preserves its own ecclesiastical and liturgical traditions and laws ("sui juris" literally meaning "by its own law"). The majority of these churches have either a "patriarch" or a "major archbishop" and a synod composed of their bishops which elects their bishops, including the patriarch or major archbishop, after which the pope "gives his assent" to the synod's election. The pope officially "appoints" bishops for "sui juris" ritual churches that are too small to constitute a synod, but this clearly is not the preferred arrangement. The following bodies are quite small (specifics come from the 2015 edition of the Catholic Almanac published by Our Sunday Visitor).
The Belarusan Catholics and the Russian Catholics each have a few parishes overseen by an apostolic visitor. The Catholic Almanac does not indicate membership.
The Bulgarian Catholic Church consists of one apostolic exarchate and about 10,000 members.
The Greek Catholic Church consists of two apostolic exarchates and about 6,020 members.
And all of these entities have existed, and sustained themselves, far longer than the ordinariates for former Anglicans, so the Vatican clearly has experience dealing with such small entities.
A big part of the story of the "sui juris" churches in communion with the pope is political, and generally coercive. I do not know the history of every one of them but I doubt that we will find many models which can be adapted to contemporary circumstances. And the numbers in even the smallest of these entities are significantly greater than all three Ordinariates combined, as you point out. In any event, "sui juris" status for the "Anglican Rite" was explicitly rejected. This played a decisive role in the decline and fall of John Hepworth.As far as I can see, the Eastern rite churches are only a very rough parallel to the Anglican ordinariates. While it is an argument in their favor on one hand that they've lasted so long, this nevertheless is a contrast to the ordinariates, which are actuarially shaky even now. I can think of at least two prominent Eastern rite Catholics in current US life, Robert Spencer, the Mahometan counterapologist and Jeanine Pirro, the Fox commentator. There are no remotely equivalent ordinariate members, which I find a matter of concern given the robust intellectual tradition among Anglicans.
My regular correspondent added,
In every instance, the small sui juris churches are either Catholic enclaves within a majority Orthodox environment, or expatriate entities maintaining their ethnic/linguistic identity. These circumstances are not analogous to that of former Anglicans, whose liturgical and cultural differences from mainstream Latin Rite Catholicism in the UK, North America, or Australia are very small, and getting smaller as elements of typical Catholic parish life such as the Knights of Columbus or the Divine Mercy devotions are embraced.My visitor responded later,
Don't forget that the Bulgarian Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic Church were considerably smaller than their present size when they came into full communion.The problem I see here is that, even as my visitor acknowledges, this simply isn't likely.I'm not persuaded that the nuance of a "separate rite" verses a "variation of the Roman Rite" is all that critical. It's quite easy to envision the Anglican Communion becoming a "sui juris" ritual church with the see of Canterbury as its major archbishopric at some point in the future. Unfortunately, recent changes in the Anglican Communion have made such an event much less imminent than it might have seemed a couple decades ago. I cannot envision the Catholic Church accepting Bishop Gene Robinson, for example, as a candidate for ordination, and anything resembling a marital union of homosexual couples is out of the question in the Catholic Church.
