People Get Ready

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.

Introduction: Unstable Communities of the Faithful 1 1 Beyond Unity in Diversity 30 2 Urban Borderlands 63 3 Receiving Vatican II in Roxbury 88 4 Passion of the Neighborhood 116 5 Ritualizing Solidarity 161 6 Staying Alive 188 Appendix: Interviews 205 Acknowledgments 213 Notes 217 Index 259

. . . [A] valuable resource for anyone concerned with the potential of the local parish to promote real solidarity in times of division and mistrust.-- "America Magazine" What a blessing it would be if every parish had a sympathetic and penetrating chronicler like Susan Bigelow Reynolds, whose book People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury examines St. Mary of the Angels Parish in that Boston neighborhood. . . This is an excellent book and it should be read by a wide audience.-- "National Catholic Reporter" 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 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 Angeles 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