Abstract
How can insights from the international Slow movement deepen our understanding of moral conversion in the face of injustice? This article proposes an understanding of solidarity with the marginalized as slow conversion, that is, as ongoing conversion to the neighbor that is relational, costly, and enduring. After distinguishing “slow conversion” from what some have termed “epiphanic conversion,” I illustrate the distinction by contrasting two efforts to construct parish-based interracial solidarity in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston during the 1960s: the Roxbury Apostolate, a clergy mission to the inner-city developed from outcomes of a summer urban immersion trip for seminarians, and the St. Mary of the Angels Parish Pastoral Council, a participatory lay advisory board established after Vatican II. While the former initiative articulated a grander vision and more sweeping goals, it was the latter, more mundane structure that ultimately proved to be a source of relational, costly, and enduring solidarity between church and neighborhood. Slow conversion can thus be understood as the work not of a single moment of insight or encounter but the project of a lifetime, sustained over generations through community practices and structures.
Keywords
The past four decades have witnessed the emergence of what has become known as the Slow movement, a broad-based commitment to reclaiming time in a world obsessed with productivity, efficiency, and the ceaseless performance of mastery. 1 The movement traces its origins to 1980s Italy, where activist Carlo Petrini mounted an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the opening of a McDonald’s in the historic Piazza di Spagna. Petrini’s protest eventually gave rise to the international Slow Food movement. Adherents seek to preserve local food cultures and traditional cooking methods while protecting biodiversity. Its logo, appropriately, is a snail. 2
The idea of slowness as resistance has taken root in other spheres as well, from economics to academia. Slow fashion, for example, resists the labor exploitation, wasteful consumption, and global environmental degradation of the fast fashion industry. “Slow” clothes are made to last from sustainable, repairable materials by garment workers who are paid a just wage. 3 In Christian terms, the goal of slow fashion is to encourage right relationship between workers, consumers, material goods, and the earth. In the field of higher education, meanwhile, scholars Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber observe how the corporatization of the contemporary university has given rise to a culture of ceaseless productivity, leading to the exploitation of academic labor and undermining the genuine pursuit of knowledge. In their book The Slow Professor, the authors enjoin academics to challenge the corporate university’s culture of speed by cultivating practices of slowness in research and teaching. 4 The COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified critiques of the fetishization of productivity as disruptions in business-as-usual have led many to reconsider their relationships with work.
To be clear, there’s much to critique about the Slow movement, especially its unarticulated assumptions about class. 5 Nevertheless, the movement’s essential vision of life grounded in relationship, intentionality, rest, gratitude, cultivation, dignity, and joy, all implicated in the embrace of slow time, has much to teach those of us concerned with ecclesial community and mission. Theologically, three dimensions of “slowness” are worth noting. First, it is relational. The Slow movement regards everyday practices not merely as individual consumer choices but as relationships, invariably implicating the welfare of countless others and the earth. Second, it is costly. It entails the sacrifice of money, time, efficiency, material goods, and prestige, espousing in theory if not always in practice something like what Jesuit Dean Brackley called “downward mobility.” 6 Third, it is enduring. Slow work is motivated by a desire to create things that last, things that nourish bodies, communities, and the natural world. Paradoxically, such endurance is grounded in ephemerality. Slowing down seeks to make worthy use of life’s brevity—to savor time, to dwell in and with the world, to die well. “Slow” thus denotes an orientation toward life in the world that is relational, costly, and enduring.
How might this vision of slowness refine our understanding of the relationship between conversion and mission? In contexts of structural disparity, moral conversion 7 on the part of the privileged is often bound up with the embrace of solidarity. Gustavo Gutierrez calls this “conversion to the neighbor,” a turn to God embodied in a turn toward the poor and marginalized. 8 Yet well-known narratives of moral conversion frequently portray conversion as sweeping, linear, and sudden, and the solidarity that follows as more product than process. Following the insights of the Slow movement, I propose instead that a more adequate way of understanding the relationship between mission and solidarity is in what I would term slow conversion—that is, ongoing conversion to the neighbor that is relational, costly, and enduring. After distinguishing “slow conversion” from what some have termed “epiphanic conversion,” I illustrate the significance of distinction by contrasting two efforts to construct parish-based interracial solidarity in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston during the 1960s. Slow conversion, I ultimately suggest, is the work not of a single moment of insight or encounter but the project of a lifetime, sustained over generations through community practices and structures.
Solidarity as product or process?
In the Christian tradition, conversion is often defined by a sense of once-and-for-all-ness, narratively framed in dramatic terms with a clear “before” and “after.” In the New Testament, we encounter Saul of Tarsus, the convert par excellence. His encounter on the Road to Damascus in Acts 9 is in many ways the archetypal conversion narrative: a jolt of blinding light, a voice from above, a new name. Paul’s conversion is a metanoia in every sense—a decisive and complete turning around. Other foundational narratives of moral conversion are no less defined by once-and-for-all-ness, from St. Augustine to Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola to Bartolomé de las Casas.
It is no surprise that the conversion narratives that loom largest in the Christian social imaginary are those of men. Indeed, such hagiographies offer highly masculine portraits of conversion. They are defined by features traditionally associated with maleness: individual insight and agency, decisiveness, finality, intellectual coherence, publicness, violence. Above all, they are marked by Pauline conviction, stark and unambiguous. Indeed, it is their lack of ambiguity, their lack of in-betweenness or morally impure waffling, that makes them compelling. Though these public conversions often place their subjects at odds with those in power, the social and ecclesial capital of their male subjects nevertheless enables these Spirit-driven breaks with the past to be received within the tradition as prophecy rather than hysteria.
In once-and-for-all conversion narratives, justice is framed as the outcome or product of conversion. That is, the subject experiences a sudden, divinely inspired change of heart, which prompts him to break with the past and reorient his life toward right relationship with God and others, especially the marginalized and persecuted. The convert moves from injustice to justice, individual caprice to ecclesial accountability, persecutor to defender, distance to solidarity.
A certain efficiency characterizes these linear accounts of personal transformation. Yet this portrait of conversion also merits more critical interrogation. Catholic theologian Antonio Alonso argues that in probing such “epiphanic conversions” more deeply, and on their own terms, we come to see that where interpreters and hagiographers have emphasized their subjects’ sweeping changes of heart, in fact the lives of these storied converts tell much more nuanced and gradual stories of transformation. To illustrate the critique, Alonso invokes the conversion of Las Casas, the 16th-century Spanish priest and missionary who was among the first colonists to speak out against the atrocities of the encomienda system in the West Indies. Interpreters from Enrique Dussel to Roberto Goizueta have focused attention on Las Casas’ Pentecost conversion, which Las Casas recounts in Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies). 9 As Las Casas prepared to celebrate the Eucharist for Spanish rulers in present-day Cuba on the Feast of Pentecost 1514, his eyes were opened to the evils of indigenous enslavement. Fueled by conviction, he devoted the rest of his life to prophetic advocacy on behalf of the Taíno people. Like Paul, Las Casas turned from complicity in repression to the defense of those he once persecuted. Yet while Dussel and others characterize Las Casas’ life in clear “before” and “after” terms, Alonso contends, framing Las Casas’ conversion as a singular turn from complicity to justice overlooks the far more incremental reality of his change of heart. Indeed, Las Casas’ own writings suggest that his Pentecost insight was the culmination of a much more gradual recognition of the atrocities of the encomienda system. Equally critical is the fact that Las Casas’ solution to the problem of Taíno oppression was to promote the African slave trade instead. It would be another three decades before he recognized in African enslavement the same evil he perceived in indigenous enslavement. 10
Should we conclude, then, that Las Casas’ Pentecost epiphany was overstated? Incomplete? Or might we instead befriend a vision of conversion not as a single moment of solidarity-producing insight, but rather as the slow practice of an entire lifetime? In the following section, I offer a case study from post-Vatican II American Catholic history that demonstrates the consequential relationship between operative understandings of moral conversion and the shape of ecclesial mission in and to the world.
Two models of interracial solidarity in Roxbury, MA
During the 1960s, the confluence of the Second Vatican Council, the War on Poverty, and the Civil Rights movement turned ecclesiastical attention toward the plight of the urban poor. For the Catholic church in Boston, no single place represented the moral urgency of urban poverty as vividly as Roxbury, often cited by municipal and archdiocesan authorities alike as the epicenter of Boston’s “inner city.” By the 1960s, white flight had severely siphoned jobs, industries, and resources from Roxbury. Its so-called blighted neighborhoods were the targets of urban renewal projects, many of which did more to displace poor Black residents than to rejuvenate the area. 11 For the church, Boston’s gaping racial divide was also a parochial one. Middle- and upper-class white Catholics increasingly inhabited suburban parishes, while predominately poor Black and Hispanic Catholics were disproportionately concentrated in urban centers like Roxbury and worshipped in under-resourced, inner-city parishes. For some church leaders, the city’s racial divide had become a source of major pastoral concern, even as ecclesial dynamics contributed to the rift. Virulent racism was a persistent feature of the Boston Catholic landscape, once prompting Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing to warn the faithful that “the price of segregation here below may well be segregation for all eternity from the company of the elect.” 12 Yet despite Cushing’s appeals for racial equality and the efforts of organizations like Boston’s Catholic Interracial Council, white Catholic attitudes on race remained stubbornly unchanged. 13
Roxbury’s smallest Catholic church was St. Mary of the Angels, a racially and culturally diverse parish originally built at the turn of the 20th century to serve working-class European immigrants. St. Mary’s was a kind of waystation in the midst of an urban cultural borderland. By the 1920s, the parish boundaries encompassed the contentious borderline between Catholic- and Jewish-occupied blocks of upper Roxbury. In the 1950s, African Americans moving northward during the Great Migration settled in the neighborhood, transforming St. Mary’s into a home for Black Catholics. Successive migrations from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic prompted the addition of a Spanish Mass in 1971. By the end of the decade, St. Mary’s would also become a religious and social hub for Catholic Laotian Khmhu refugees in the city, while a growing Haitian community would prompt the addition of French and Creole ministries. By the 1980s, people of more than 40 nationalities would call the tiny church home. 14
As Vatican II transformed and revitalized Catholic understandings of mission within the church (ad intra) and to the world (ad extra), St. Mary’s became the site of two mission-driven attempts to cultivate interracial solidarity in Roxbury. The first was a 1965 pilot program established by Cardinal Cushing aimed at providing pastoral intervention to inner-city parishes in the Archdiocese of Boston called the Roxbury Apostolate. The missionary endeavor sought to reimagine parish structures and clergy roles in light of Vatican II’s call to solidarity, collaboration, and pastoral reform. The second was the establishment of the St. Mary’s Parish Pastoral Council around 1969. Seizing the post-conciliar ethos of lay leadership and innovation, laity at St. Mary’s leaned hard into their newfound sense of power to place their struggling church into a relationship of costly solidarity with the increasingly marginalized community it served. Yet only one of these mission-driven initiatives led to enduring transformations in power and community relationships.
Vatican II and the Roxbury Apostolate: Solidarity as product
It was clear that the Boston Catholic church’s racism problem would not be solved by authoritative decrees, nor by prayerfully waiting for white Catholics to have a change of heart. What was needed instead was a profound ecclesial recommitment to urban parishes and their people. In the summer of 1964, the archdiocese sent a group of seminarians to participate in a four-week-long inner-city immersion at St. Joseph’s Parish in Roxbury. During their weeks in the city, the men worked for community organizations like the newly founded Massachusetts Freedom Movement, assisted with voter registration drives, and conducted a parish census, visiting parishioners in their homes. In the evenings, they heard lectures from local leaders, organizers, and educators. At the end of the summer, the seminarians collected their critical reflections on the experience in a report they presented to Cushing. 15 The Roxbury Report, as they titled their conclusions, recounted how their immersion in the everyday lives of the urban poor had awakened in them a profound moral conversion—one, they believed, with urgent implications for the church’s mission. During a talk one evening, they wrote, the speaker, Sr. Marie Augusta, SND, of Emmanuel College, “told us . . . why some Christians can be racists without realizing they are wrong. ‘When you don’t know, it doesn’t bother your conscience,’” she explained to them. “We have come to know, and our consciences are bothering us.” 16
Most striking was the Roxbury Report’s reflection on the fraught relationship between suburban and urban parishes, which was another way of describing the relationship between white Catholics and Catholics of color. The report contended that the fundamental problem behind the Boston Catholic church’s racial divide was white Catholics’ refusal of solidarity with their Black and Brown neighbors. “The sickness of Roxbury is the sickness of the suburbs,” the report’s authors averred. 17 Like St. Mary’s, most parishes in Roxbury were established during a period of 19th- and early 20th-century church-building fueled by concern for the spiritual needs of immigrant Catholics. But as the Boston Irish and other descendants of European immigrants seized postwar opportunities for upward mobility, so did the church. Once African Americans began moving into the city, the institution, like many of its white faithful, increasingly made a preferential option for the suburbs.
Moved by their encounters with the poor in Roxbury, the seminarians argued for a pastoral approach to the inner city grounded in a firmer stance against racial and economic injustice and in greater cooperation between parishes and local community organizations. Racial injustice in Boston parish life could only be addressed by a systemic ecclesial recommitment to the city, the report concluded. In August 1964, just before departing for Rome to begin the third session of Vatican II, Cushing announced his intention to create a missionary apostolate for “the renewal of the life of the Church lived in its inner-city parishes.” 18 He put out a call for priest-volunteers “ready to give their all to the poorest of the poor.” 19
When Cushing returned from Rome in November 1964, he convened the group that would become known as the Roxbury Apostolate. The Apostolate would begin in three parishes, including St. Mary’s. Each would be assigned a pastor, a parish administrator, and a deacon from among the volunteers. As the men readied themselves for their new assignments, they convened for prayer and discussion at a series of preparatory meetings. One of the key debates that arose during these meetings was whether the parish structure itself was equipped to foster the kind of solidarity necessary to address the injustices dividing the church. The question was a topic of intense debate. According to minutes of the first meeting, some present argued that the parochial structure was inadequate and should be abandoned because it reinforced the social and economic disconnect between priests and laity and artificially divided up urban communities along parish lines. Others voiced support for the existing structure, noting that people already felt bound by loyalty to their parishes. Introducing a new organizational structure could bring needless strife, not to mention potential canonical challenges, and would require resources that they didn’t have. 20 Ultimately, they settled on a middle way. The Roxbury Apostolate would work within the existing parish structure while fostering cooperation over parish lines, “making sure that the nature of the parish is such that it serves the needs of the people.” 21 Clergy selected for ministry in Roxbury were instructed to begin by immersing themselves in the lived realities of the people of their parish and to allow a stance of solidarity to guide their pastoral approach. They were to adopt a standard of living equal to that of their mostly impoverished parishioners. 22 Rectories should become open-doored “parish houses,” spaces for community gathering and welcome, breaking down the wall that divided clergy from laity and church from community. 23
The goal of the Roxbury Apostolate was to revitalize Roxbury parishes by cultivating an organic, porous relationship between the church and world—or, more specifically, between the parish and the neighborhood. Apostolate priests were urged to work ecumenically with other churches and to collaborate with one another across parish lines, recognizing that the “church in the inner city is part of a complex urban structure.” 24 They were instructed to empower the faithful to ensure that parish leadership reflected the local community. They were urged to support local credit unions, cooperatives, and workers’ unions, to involve themselves in civic affairs, and to advocate publicly on behalf of their people. They were to approach their new roles with open minds, prepared to embrace experimental pastoral solutions. Above all, they were to treat the laity with humility and a spirit of collaboration, rejecting the paternalism that had long characterized the role of the priest. 25
On February 23, 1965, three apostolate clergy—Fr. Henry F. Barry, Fr. Lawrence Perry, and Deacon Thomas Corrigan—moved into the St. Mary of the Angels parish house and set about heeding their mandate to read the signs of the times. Parish records and the long memory of one of St. Mary’s most senior parishioners offer a sketch of their early days. They established a summer camp for neighborhood children, led a mostly volunteer effort to renovate the St. Mary’s sanctuary in accordance with Vatican II’s liturgical revisions, and, after arsonists repeatedly broke into the church, turned the front office of the parish house into a small chapel for daily Mass. 26
But what became of the pastoral experiment in Roxbury is not clear. I did not come across any follow-up records or evaluative reports of the Roxbury Apostolate in Boston’s archdiocesan archives. Neither did the files contain applications from men seeking to join the Apostolate beyond those received after Cushing’s initial call, suggesting that the program either dissolved, was folded into another initiative, or ceased to be publicized. What is clear is that the archdiocese’s formal commitment to solidarity with Roxbury was short-lived. As such, it did little to address the systemic asymmetries of power and resources that marginalized poor Black and Brown Catholics in Boston. Cushing’s successor was bishop Humberto Medeiros, whose storied commitment to racial and economic justice was emblematized by his iconic 1972 pastoral letter “Man’s Cities and God’s Poor.” Despite such expressions of concern, however, parish conditions on the ground in Roxbury deteriorated. By the early 1970s, reports from area priests suggested that the situation at St. Mary’s was as bad as it had ever been. The open rectory—so ideal-sounding in the rosy glow of Vatican II—had become a serious problem as boundaries dissolved completely. The parish was badly understaffed and plagued with clergy infighting. In 1972 and 1973, St. Mary’s priests were robbed at gunpoint four times in six months. Scared for their own safety and ground down by parish dysfunction, clergy isolated themselves from the neighborhood. 27 By the time another new priest, Fr. John “Jack” Roussin, arrived at the parish in December 1976, he was met by a flooded parish house with a boarded-up front door, eight parishioners at Sunday Mass, and a collection basket of $8.80. 28
Why did the Roxbury Apostolate prove unsustainable? First, despite its good intentions, its planning and implementation was one-sided and top-down. The mission and vision driving the Apostolate were informed largely by impressions of life in Roxbury from the white, mostly outsider seminarians and priests who served there temporarily, and were structured, implemented, and administered from above. While Apostolate organizers encouraged volunteer priests to eschew paternalism toward the faithful, preparatory meeting minutes nevertheless evince how deeply engrained such attitudes were. The “Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and others” of Roxbury were portrayed as powerless, uneducated, living in filth, reliant on welfare, and tragically deprived of the virtues of a stable Christian family life.
Second, though it demanded much of the nine priests and deacons selected as the first cohort of Apostolate volunteers, the program asked virtually nothing of the broader white Catholic community. In an effort to link city to suburbs, the archdiocese established a parish partnership program that paired poor, urban parishes with wealthy ones for nominal financial and charitable support. Beyond Christmas gift drives and financial donations, however, the program demanded nothing of suburban whites, the group whose resistance to interracial solidarity was identified as the problem in the first place.
Third, and perhaps most critically, because the program was introduced from above, it was predicated on the archbishop’s authority to install clergy in parishes and withdraw them at will. While implemented with a genuine desire to do good for Roxbury, the fact remained that archdiocesan support for the upstart program could be withdrawn as swiftly as it was given. In a hierarchical institution characterized by frequent personnel change, even the worthiest pastoral initiatives can atrophy when the individual who champions them is transferred or when budgetary constraints demand (or offer an excuse for) their dissolution. Given the lack of any apparent follow-up on the program, this seems to be precisely what happened. Thus, while one might view this period in St. Mary’s history as a hopeful but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in the parish-level implementation of Vatican II’s vision of mission, I would suggest that the short-lived Roxbury Apostolate tells us more about the risks of programmatic solidarity propelled by the epiphanic conversions of well-intentioned outsiders and predicated on transitory institutional goodwill.
The Parish Pastoral Council: Solidarity as process
The second solidarity effort at St. Mary’s was similarly inspired by Vatican II but came from a much more unlikely corner of the council’s documents: Apostolicam Actuositatem (AA), the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity. AA laid the groundwork for structures of cooperation and collaboration between clergy, religious, and laity by recommending the incorporation of laypeople into parish leadership in an advisory capacity, particularly with respect to its pastoral and apostolic work (AA 26). This recommendation led to the advent of the Parish Pastoral Council (PPC). Following Vatican II, the Archdiocese of Boston released guidelines urging parishes to form pastoral councils “for that uniting of hierarchy and laity which the council sees as absolutely necessary.” 29 Some of the initial details were hazy. The structure and purpose of parish councils would be reinterpreted, clarified, and eventually codified in the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law. 30 But at St. Mary’s, parishioners aching for a sense of agency perceived an opening, establishing a PPC of their own. The multiracial, 14-person council included lay women and men as well as the parish’s two priests. During the spring and summer of 1969, the PPC made a series of bold and costly decisions to place the struggling parish into a relationship of enduring economic and liturgical solidarity with the people and neighborhoods it served.
The PPC’s first action was to vote in favor of transferring St. Mary’s bank accounts from the First National Bank of Boston to the Unity Bank and Trust Company of Roxbury, the first Black-operated bank in the city. The move, the council chairman explained, was meant to demonstrate solidarity with the Black community in and around the parish. 31 Unity Bank and Trust charged higher fees than First National did, meaning that the decision would cost the cash-strapped parish money that it barely had. But council members determined that the move’s symbolic importance was worth the financial sacrifice. Composing a request to the chancery for the transfer of the parish’s funds, parish administrator Fr. William Calter attached a copy of the PPC’s decision to his letter. But once it reached the chancery, the letter set off alarm bells. How much authority had St. Mary’s clergy given over to laity? Cushing ultimately granted the request, but only under the condition that Calter advise the headstrong council on its proper place in the administrative structure of the parish: outside of it. 32
Undeterred by Cushing’s rebuke of the authority they claimed, the PPC persisted. After reorienting their community’s economic commitments, they shifted focus to liturgical life. That spring, at the behest of the parish’s Spiritual Development Committee, the PPC voted unanimously to request archdiocesan permission to celebrate the Sunday Mass on Saturday evenings during the summer, “on the basis of pastoral experiment.” The anticipatory Saturday liturgy was an outcome of Vatican II whose implementation was still under development at the time. Offering Mass on Saturday evenings instead of Sunday would address a “pastoral-liturgical problem which seems very evident during the summer season each year,” they wrote, that of “the unfortunate conflict between Sunday Mass participation and legitimate recreation outside the city on the one day when this is possible.” They continued,
We realize that this conflict exists in many parishes; yet we realize that most of our people do not have the pleasure of a summer cottage or the luxury of weekends away from home. Economically, this is out of their reach. The only opportunity for any relaxation away from the oppressive pace and heat of the city is a day trip on Sunday.
If Saturday Mass were not possible, the PPC proposed an unconventional alternative: perhaps they could begin the Sunday liturgy at midnight during the summer. 33 Cushing dismissed the midnight Mass idea, but he applied to Rome on their behalf for the dispensation necessary to celebrate a Saturday evening liturgy. The Vatican granted the dispensation, giving Cushing the authority to allow the accommodation in any parish in the archdiocese that requested it. In postconciliar Boston, then, the first Saturday evening Masses were celebrated as a result of lay insistence that working-class, city-dwelling people deserved a day of rest and leisure.
The PPC’s biggest fight of all during the summer of 1969 was for funds to construct a badly needed parish hall. Calter was reticent to pursue the matter with the archdiocese. Circumventing their priest, the PPC appealed directly to the recently established Archdiocesan Commission for the Promotion of Parish Councils for support. The Commission called a hearing on the matter and ultimately ruled in the PPC’s favor: the people of St. Mary’s had the right to present their concerns to Cardinal Cushing. “Accordingly,” the Commission chair concluded, “the veto of Father Calter is overruled by a unanimous vote of the members present.” 34 Buoyed by their success, the PPC sent a request for support to Cushing, along with a copy of their “verdict.” The reply was swift and severe. Parish Councils were formed to advise, not govern, Cushing wrote. Administrative power lies with clergy alone. What’s more, he averred, the Commission for the Promotion of Parish Councils had no authority whatsoever to hear an appeal like theirs and never should have done so in the first place. Their request was denied.
The late 1960s was a period of intense racial upheaval in Roxbury. In 1967 and 1968, massive riots tore through Blue Hill Avenue, less than a mile up the street from St. Mary’s. It was within this context that St. Mary’s fledgling PPC had determined that the time had come to place the church into a relationship of material solidarity with its community. The decisions were costly in more ways than one. Moving the parish’s accounts to the city’s Black-operated bank resulted in a small but consequential financial loss for a parish so poor that it relied on subsidies from the archdiocese just to keep its lights on. But the PPC’s decisions also cost the parish social capital. The laity’s show of strength invited the suspicion of the archdiocese on whose support St. Mary’s relied for survival and placed the community at odds with one of its own priests.
The PPC’s decisions were also about power—a demonstration of the laity’s willingness to lead and a defiance of the hegemony of clerical authority that had often proven unreliable to inner-city parishes. As chancery officials were quick to point out, and as subsequent ecclesiastical interpretations of parish councils made clear, St. Mary’s laity were exercising authority that they did not technically possess. Parish councils were supposed to function more like advisory boards for priests than as boards of directors. Yet in a church that previously accorded laity no formal role in the direction of parish affairs, the PPC—even in its advisory capacity—represented a seat at the table. Despite the dismal conditions of the ensuing years—conditions that arose from near-total institutional neglect—this solidarity became the early PPC’s greatest legacy and, when shutdown threatened St. Mary’s in 2004, the singular cause of the parish’s survival.
Conclusion: Solidarity as relational, costly, and enduring conversion
In the story of Vatican II-era Roxbury, we glimpse two models of solidarity in difference: the earnest, high-minded Roxbury Apostolate, and the mundane but participatory structure of the PPC. Surely, at first glance, the former would appear a more promising site of ecclesial mission to the poor. After all, it involved or invited many of the hallmarks of classic conversion narratives: heroic, masculine missionary immersion in the world of the other, startling encounter, sincere conviction, written testimony, the specter of inner-city violence. Sent from St. John’s Seminary in Brighton seven miles and a world away to Roxbury, the seminarians were knocked off their proverbial horses. Their eyes were opened, their hearts transformed. Like Las Casas, they recognized the imperative of justice and felt penitent shame at their own complicity in upholding the racial status quo. Moral epiphanies born of encounter and immersion should not be dismissed, and it is not my intention to challenge the significance of such conversion experiences for the Boston seminarians whose lives and ministries were reoriented by the first-of-its-kind immersion program. It is vital to recognize, however, that for Catholics in Roxbury, the attempt to construct a model of ecclesial solidarity—one that sought local structural transformation and a thoroughgoing inversion of power relationships—on the basis of clerical epiphanic conversion proved fleeting.
By contrast, it is hard to imagine anything less classically compelling or heroic than a PPC meeting. Having attended my fair share of parish council meetings at St. Mary’s in the present era, one word that comes to mind to describe them is slow. Every contribution was translated between Spanish and English in real time, to the point that long-time members had adopted a stop-and-start cadence to their speech to enable time for translation. Meetings rarely ended on time, and when they did end, there was always work left unfinished. Communal discernment often felt viscerally inefficient. Yet it was not ineffective. Everyone’s voices were heard. Multiple perspectives were considered and negotiated. Decisions represented not merely the whims of the pastor or the will of a select group of lay leaders but, in some messy and multifaceted way, the vision of the entire community. This was not a site of once-and-for-all but of bearing-with. A friend who lived in a Catholic Worker house once told me about a sign that hung in their kitchen that read, “Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.” Figuratively (and sometimes literally), PPC meetings were where the people of St. Mary’s did the dishes—where, in the most quotidian ways imaginable, this community of difference sustained their commitments to one another and their neighborhood, where they worked out what theologian M. Shawn Copeland calls the “wrenching task” of solidarity in real time. 35 Thus, of the two Vatican II-era attempts to cultivate solidarity within and beyond the church in Roxbury, it was this profoundly ordinary parish-level intervention that gave rise to enduring, self-sacrificial relationships across many forms of difference.
I observed this legacy of solidarity firsthand. Beginning in 2011, I spent six years as a parishioner-researcher at St. Mary’s. For the first year, as a graduate student, I lived in the parish house, which by then had not had a priest in residence for many years. When I first started asking parishioners about their relationships with others at St. Mary’s—especially their friendships with parishioners of other races, ethnicities, and life situations—I expected to hear reflections about the beauty of worshipping in such an inclusive community. I was surprised (though, in a parish of community organizers, perhaps I should not have been) when many of them talked about meetings—especially PPC meetings.
“I go to parish council [and think], Oh, I love all these people!” laughed one parishioner, a white woman in her 50s. “You know, so it’s the same tired issues. But I still love all these people. It’s sort of the power of the laity persisting through all the ups and downs and transitions of pastors.” 36 This persistence—this slowness—was also the source of deep friendships across difference. When I asked one longtime parish leader from the Dominican Republic whom she felt closest to at the parish, many of those she named were fellow PPC members from both Spanish- and English-speaking communities. “We worked together for so many years,” she explained. “This is the group that I—for any problem that happened to any of the parishioners—I can just call and say, listen, we have to sit down and resolve this. Okay? So I feel like I have a closeness with them.” 37
Within the Slow movement, the rejection of “fast” (food, fashion, scholarship) has much to do with the rejection of convenience. “Fast” conversion, on the other hand, is rarely about convenience—indeed, by its definition, conversion rarely makes life easier for its subjects. Instead, slow conversion challenges the expectation of immediate and quantifiable success in mission-driven work. Embracing slow conversion frustrates the insidious neoliberal approach to ecclesial ministry that instrumentalizes relationships as “value-adds” and demands breathless innovation over sustained listening, local dwelling, liturgical participation, patient labor, and the expectation of failure. Slow conversion can thus be understood as the work not of a single moment but the project of a lifetime, sustained over generations through community participation. In the present US moment, in which traditional measures of “success” in ministry paint an increasingly dismal picture, we might dream differently about the ends toward which we strive. The times call us to a certain humility. Understanding solidarity as the relational, costly, and enduring work of slow conversion beckons us, in the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s well-loved prayer, to “trust in the slow work of God.”
Footnotes
Funding
The author received financial support from the Brewer Fund for Communities and Congregations Research at Candler School of Theology to complete research in the Archdiocese of Boston archives. The author received no financial support for the authorship or publication of this article.
