People Get Ready

WINNER, COLLEGE THEOLOGY SOCIETY 2024 BEST BOOK AWARD

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.

Susan Bigelow Reynolds is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where her research focuses on public ritual, culture, and questions of marginality and suffering in ecclesial communities.Seitz John C. :

John C. Seitz is a scholar of U.S. religion. He serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and as an Associate Director for the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.Susan Bigelow Reynolds is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where her research focuses on public ritual, culture, and questions of marginality and suffering in ecclesial communities.

. . . [A] valuable resource for anyone concerned with the potential of the local parish to promote real solidarity in times of division and mistrust.

Susan Bigelow Reynolds’ People Get Ready is a probing, deeply moving, and inspiring study of a culturally diverse 21st century city parish that at the same time offers a lens for rethinking 20th century U.S. Catholic history more broadly as well. Learned in modern Catholic thought and an exquisitely attentive ethnographer, Reynolds brings the two together—conciliar and post-conciliar theologies and the lived experience of the parishioners of St. Mary of the Angels/Santa Maria de los Ángeles in Roxbury—in a way that richly amplifies both. People Get Ready joins a short shelf of books absolutely essential for understanding U.S. Catholicism after Vatican II in the crosscurrents of race, emigration, religious conflict, and the rise of the neoliberal city. With this work, Catholic Studies finds a powerful new voice and a model for future scholarship.---Robert Orsi, Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, and author of History and Presence

People Get Ready is a beautifully written, sensitive and timely book. Susan Reynolds is a gifted ethnographer-theologian and writer, and makes important contributions to our understanding of multi-ethnic, multi-national migrant Catholic parishes. She introduces her reader to Saint Mary of the Angels parish in Roxbury, where rituals are the ‘language of community’ and a powerful vector for a radical love that transcends divisions. I predict that this deeply moving book becomes a go-to primer for academics, community groups, and church leaders alike in how to build, maintain and sustain beloved community---Kristy Nabhan-Warren, author of Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland