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People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury
What does it mean to be a community of difference?
St. Mary of the Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston’s Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the neighborhood, transforming streets into borderlines and the parish into a waystation. Today, the church sustains a community of Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from Roxbury and beyond.
In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds traces how the people of St. Mary’s constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across difference. She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and around the church in the wake of Boston’s 2004 parish shutdowns. Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for a retrieval of Vatican II’s notion of ecclesial solidarity as a basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration, displacement, and change.
It is through the work of ritual, the story of St. Mary’s reveals, that we learn to negotiate the borders in our midst—to cultivate friendships, exercise power, build peace, and, in a real way, to survive.
St. Mary of the Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston’s Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the neighborhood, transforming streets into borderlines and the parish into a waystation. Today, the church sustains a community of Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from Roxbury and beyond.
In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds traces how the people of St. Mary’s constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across difference. She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and around the church in the wake of Boston’s 2004 parish shutdowns. Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for a retrieval of Vatican II’s notion of ecclesial solidarity as a basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration, displacement, and change.
It is through the work of ritual, the story of St. Mary’s reveals, that we learn to negotiate the borders in our midst—to cultivate friendships, exercise power, build peace, and, in a real way, to survive.
271 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 17, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 29, 2023
"If communion describes the eschatological character of the Church, solidarity proposes the shape of its task in history."
A powerful account of solidarity in practice that blends ethnography and ecclesiology to tell the story of a small Boston parish community that saved itself from closure in the early 2000s. This book centers on the challenges of creating a community of difference, critiquing the dominating 'communion model' of ecclesiology and arguing for an alternative model of solidarity - one which views human difference as a good rather than as a challenge to be overcome. It then shows this difference in practice through the ritual life and struggles of the community, culminating in the successful campaign to save the parish from closure.
If you're reading Fratelli Tutti and find yourself wondering what a 'polyhedron' model of society might look like in practice, this might be a good book to add to your list. It's clear from the onset that this is a work of immense personal significance to both the author and all of her fellow parishioners whose interviews and stories shape it, and this is what makes it really stand out.
A powerful account of solidarity in practice that blends ethnography and ecclesiology to tell the story of a small Boston parish community that saved itself from closure in the early 2000s. This book centers on the challenges of creating a community of difference, critiquing the dominating 'communion model' of ecclesiology and arguing for an alternative model of solidarity - one which views human difference as a good rather than as a challenge to be overcome. It then shows this difference in practice through the ritual life and struggles of the community, culminating in the successful campaign to save the parish from closure.
If you're reading Fratelli Tutti and find yourself wondering what a 'polyhedron' model of society might look like in practice, this might be a good book to add to your list. It's clear from the onset that this is a work of immense personal significance to both the author and all of her fellow parishioners whose interviews and stories shape it, and this is what makes it really stand out.
December 31, 2023
Really interesting interrogation of power in the church and the sacraments. And ritual as a practice of a better world.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews