to trouble shoot I put an LCD message in the receive interrupt routine with a pause, the message is never displayed.
PAUSE within an interrupt aren't a good idea.

Set a flag to 0,
Set it within your routine,
Then check it within your main program.

What if you copy your programs for both pics down to bare EUSART code and try to get them talking?

Are you sure it worked right before with two 4550?

Uh, did you put the 4553 in backwards?

Robert