Lately though I’ve been wondering about whether I inadvertently severed ties with the OCA.
Yes you did. It happens. But that doesn’t mean the situation is not recoverable.
Your issue is that you did not get a dispensation from your bishop. Actually, you could have married in the OCA because the RC accepts that. I don’t know the Orthodox church’s official position on your marriage. It would at the very least be considered as valid as a court ceremony. People usually forget the church weddings were not the norm in the early church, yet fidelity in those marriages was important to the church and community and the church did not want them to break up for any reason. Recall saint Monica, mother of saint Augustine, was married to a pagan in a civil ceremony. This was actually very common, and no one would suggest that those marriages were not valid to God.
Likewise bishops do not want to disturb the peace of an established home. I know this from experience myself.
On another matter, theologically, the Catholic church considers the two who marry to be the agents of the sacrament (I don’t know the exact terminology right now) with the priest as a witness.
In the Orthodox church the priest is the agent of the sacrament, you are married by the priest. There is a different operating principal at work.
It doesn’t particularly bother me if I did, though obviously I would want to be able to receive the Holy Mysteries in an Orthodox Church if we move somewhere where a UGCC is not available. Based on the responses I’ve received it is up to the Orthodox priest in question to approve or deny me, though my marriage will never be recognized in his eyes?
If you want an answer to that, you have to ask an Orthodox priest (or at least pose the question on an Orthodox website). However it is not up to the priest. If you ask the priest he will only be able to tell you what his bishop decides, or perhaps the synods policy.
If you are communing regularly in the UGCC, and have no plans to stop, I would not bother with trying to rectify your situation with the Orthodox church, because as an Orthodox Christian you would not normally commune in the Catholic church.
I suggest that if you do have reservations about the Papacy, you make a serious examination of conscience. You could be receiving unworthily.
The Roman Catholic church says this:
If anyone says that the Roman pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful:
Let him be anathema.
Also:
… we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks Ex Cathedra, that is, when in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.
Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.
So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: Let him be anathema.
So if you do not fully agree with the above, you are anathema to the Catholic church and are excommunicated Latae Senteniae. You would have plenty of company, there are many cafeteria Catholics who will present themselves for communion in spite of this decree, but the above is the church’s formal position on the subject composed about 140 years ago and never yet rescinded.
