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They reacted by literally building their own Church, St Sebastian, and calling to the old country for priests. So in a very real sense Mother Cabrini was the NGO Italians needed in America to guide them past the bigoty of the Church in America.

This was not merely an Italian vs. Irish thing. Every ethnic group (Polish, Czech, German, etc.) had its own parish churches because there was real antipathy among all groups. Navigating that was a tricky prospect for any bishop. To a certain extent, it wasn't the native-born Americans who caused those problems, but the immigrant groups themselves. The native born Protestants tended to shun and dislike the Papists as a whole.

As a 100% Italian myself, I grew up long past the time when ethnic parishes were the norm. But even to this day, you will find echoes of that tendency. There are still "Italian" parishes in Philadelphia, though nobody speaks Italian anymore and few people in those parishes are anything but Americans. Most of those neighborhoods are now black, or hispanic, or yuppified.

I taught for ten years in the 70s in northern Bushwick in Brooklyn. It was the home to the last wave of Italian immigration, the postwarera. I keep in touch with a lot of the kids I taught. One funny thing. They mostly stayed bilingual but many on visiting Italy, to their parents towns, whether in Sicily or Calabria or the Alto Adige, the locals had trouble understanding them since starting with Musolinni and continuing post war local dialects were suppressed and replaced with Roman Italian.

I lived for awhile in (rather small) suburb of Boston. This rather small suburb had two (rather small) Catholic churches. Why two rather small churches, instead of one larger one, you ask? Well, obviously: one was Irish, the other was Italian.

I, being of mostly German ethnicity, could go to either one. The Italian one was more cheerful and had better music, but was further from my apartment, so I usually ended up at the Irish one.