When the new archbishop for New York was announced last week, it continued the unbroken tradition: an Irish leader for a cathedral named for an Irish saint.

Could that one day change?

This morning’s Times takes a look:

Latinos account for at least half of the Roman Catholics in New York. Their neighborhood churches are often filled to capacity. Parishes originally named for Irish saints have been renamed for Hispanic ones. Masses at St. Patrick’s Cathedral honoring the feast days of their patron saints draw crowds so large and fervent that worshipers sometimes spill out onto Fifth Avenue to pray on their knees on the sidewalk.

And when the Vatican announced last week that the next leader of the Archdiocese of New York would be Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of Milwaukee — the 10th in an unbroken line of Irish-American archbishops to hold that job since 1842 — Latino Catholics in New York reacted as they would to news of another sunrise over the East River.

The muted response did not reflect indifference to the new archbishop, whom many people seemed to like, or to the notion that appointing a prelate with a Hispanic name instead of a Celtic one might be smart: Latinos are not only ascendant in New York, but also likely to be the majority of Catholics in the United States within a decade. The archbishop of New York, with his pulpit in the media nexus of the world, has been called the pope of America.

As Latino leaders described their reaction, it was more like accepting the limits of one’s options in the family business.

“It’s not called St. Patrick’s Cathedral for nothing,” said Richard Espinal, executive director of Centro Altagracia for Faith and Justice, a Jesuit-sponsored Latino advocacy group in Harlem. “The old guard of Irish-American priests — that’s still the church’s power base in New York. I have no problem with it. I’m just happy to read in the paper that the new archbishop can say Mass in Spanish.”

By historians’ account, Irish immigrants and their offspring essentially built the Catholic Church in America. Between 1840 and 1880, Irish immigration accounted for most of the sixfold increase in the country’s Catholic population, to 6 million. The influx fueled a boom in church and school construction, much of it with Irish labor, that culminated with the completion of St. Patrick’s in 1878.

But Latinos in New York today are almost the statistical twins of Irish New Yorkers of the late 19th century: They account for 30 percent of the city’s population and, by the archdiocese’s estimate, 40 to 50 percent of its 2.5 million Catholics — an estimate that community advocates say probably misses large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

And while the archdiocese has welcomed Latinos — rededicating churches and underwriting tuition for Hispanic students in its parochial schools — they have not inherited the vast stake in the institution that their Irish-American forbears have.

Continue at the link for the rest.

PHOTO: Worshipers at St. Patrick’s Cathedral celebrating the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Mexican rite, in December. Photo by Michael Nagle for The New York Times.