“I am pious Aeneas, who carries my household gods in my ship with me, having snatched them from my enemies.” This is the narrative that, for centuries, animated the Irish-American community. The subjugation of our ancestors by the British Empire took on a religious dimension, and the culture of Irish-American Catholicism became inextricably bound up with a struggle for freedom from tyranny. And so our “household god” – St Patrick – took on significance beyond the merely pious, and St Patrick’s Day became more than the feast of a great saint. It was a kind of Irish Hanukah: a day for our community to commemorate our ancestors’ flight from subjugation Ireland and into the promised land (via Ellis Island). All that changed when the Irish integrated into mainstream American life. Corporations realised they could use the holiday to market cheap beer, plastic green bowlers, and “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirts. If everyone’s a little Irish on St Patrick’s Day, then no one’s really Irish at all. On the one hand, that’s a testament to the power of American assimilationism. On the other, the commercialisation of St Paddy’s Day did more to tear the Irish-American community from its Catholic roots than all the 19th-century nativists put together. It seems safe to assume that the newest wave of Catholic immigrants, the Latino Americans, will slowly undergo the same process. Their “household god” is Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron of the Americas. Her feast on 12 December is marked devoutly by many Americans, but especially Latinos. Archbishop José Horacio Gómez, for one, celebrated a Mass on the feast in the Cathedral of the Angels in his archdiocesan seat of Los Angeles. In his homily, like the Irish-American priests of yore, he spoke to the fears and the hopes of exile: