I can't remember ever being bored, even when shopping with my wife. Of course I am never without a book.

The transformation of American Catholicism in the first half of the nineteenth century created a form of devotion that bore little resemblance to traditional modes of worship in Ireland and Northern Europe. This "tridentine" Catholicism was consciously modeled on imperatives growing out of the sixteenth century Council of Trent and was promulgated by a cadre of missionaries trained in Rome specifically for the purpose of promoting anti-republican revivals. These reforms were systematically applied in American Catholicism from 1830 and by mid-century had effected a general transformation of Catholic devotion throughout the United States. So successful were these American reforms that they were applied in Ireland and Britain after 1850. The result was that by the late nineteenth century, as a result of their respective national "devotional revolutions" British, American and Irish Catholicism had converged around the tridentine reforms, but at mid-century American Catholicism, far from reflecting the folk or "gallican" traditions of Ireland and the German states or American republicanism, was actively hostile to both sets of traditions. Mid-century Catholic immigrants thus had to be assimilated not just to American culture, but to American Catholic culture, a process far more complicated than standard assimilation models would suggest. 
 
I might refer you to the standard work on the subject, "Rome and the New Republic" published by University of Notre Dame Press in 1996.