I'm reading an article "Irish America's Red Brick City: Edwin O'Connor's Boston which details the virtual eclipse of Irish ( and Catholic although that is not the thrust of the article) culture in Boston in the 1960s. Arguably, Boston was at one time the most populous American Catholic city and a couple of lines in this article are intriguing...
"Boston did not welcome Irish Catholics, though the city required their labors. In turn, Irish Catholics battled Yankee-Brahmin Boston, though the immigrants adopted New England values. If Boston's first families reminded the Irish immigrant of their former Anglo-Irish landlords, the Boston Lowells, Cabots and Lodges also served as their models of American propriety and achievement. As though both groups were trapped on an island, rather than crowded onto a peninsula, the Yankee-Celt encounter grew into a grudging marriage of convenience, driven by necessity, often acrimonious, but also not without respect, even love.Though their relations have been characterized by vacillation between separation and integration, Boston has been recomposed and revitalized by this Yankee-Celt passion play. "What is remarkable about the immigrant peoples—not Irish only, but all," writes Thomas N. Brown, "is the readiness with which they have adopted the Yankee past as their own and have become attached to the old places."
I saw this exact thing paralleled in my own staunchly Catholic and Irish family. At this point, most of us are Irish and Catholic in name only and are fully integrated in the secular, Protestant world.
Vatican II had nothing to do with this sad turn of events, as some allege.