Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Susan Juster
Episode: Susan Juster, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America" (UNC Press, 2025)
Date: September 12, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode explores Dr. Susan Juster's new book, A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America. Through an in-depth conversation, Dr. Juster details the lived experiences of Catholics in colonial America—a history typically overshadowed by narratives centered on Protestant settlers. The episode unpacks the complexity, diversity, and persistent invisibility of Catholic communities (including Irish, African, Indigenous, and English Catholics), highlighting how they navigated a landscape marked by anti-Catholic rhetoric, precarious coexistence, and limited religious freedom.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Motivation and Background for the Book

• Dr. Juster’s background as a historian of early American religion set the stage for the book, which emerged in response to a paradox she noticed: heated anti-Catholic rhetoric contrasted with relatively little recorded violence against Catholics.
  • “Why this disjuncture between this overheated rhetoric and this record of fairly benign, even permissive practice on the ground?” (04:20, Dr. Juster)
• While acknowledging infamous incidents such as the 1650s Maryland battle, Juster notes these were exceptions.

2. Pluralism vs. Coexistence (06:26)

• Juster is careful to distinguish between pluralism and coexistence in describing colonial religious life:
  • Pluralism suggests a celebratory, progressive narrative ending in modern religious liberty; coexistence denotes a more contingent, uneasy proximity, often marked by resistance rather than tolerance.
  • “Coexistence, to me, was just a better term to capture the contingent nature of community and religious life in this period…” (08:25, Dr. Juster)

3. The Methodological Challenge: Finding Catholics in the Sources (09:22)

• Because Catholic practice was illegal or suppressed, Catholics practiced in secret, leaving few records.
• Most surviving evidence comes from adversaries—colonial officials, Anglican ministers—reporting on suspected Catholics.
• Juster discusses the challenges of building a narrative from these “fundamentally problematic” sources:
  • “How do you find the people who do not want to be found?” (09:23, Dr. Juster)
  • “So we don't have much evidence written by Catholic men and women themselves...much of the book is written on the basis of accounts that are fundamentally problematic.” (13:19, Dr. Juster)

4. Catholic Practice: Home as Sacred Space (14:13)

• With public worship restricted, Catholics adapted by domesticating rituals—baptisms, marriages, funerals—within their homes.
• Spiritual communion and clandestine sacraments replaced traditional church rites.
  • “The essence of what it meant was to follow the rituals and sacraments of the Church...All of those things were almost impossible to do in an environment in which there are no Catholic churches.” (14:16, Dr. Juster)
• Home ritualization provided both camouflage from authorities and autonomy for believers.

5. Race, Ethnicity, and Catholic Diversity (20:05)

• The majority of colonial Catholics were not white, English elites but Irish, African, and Indigenous peoples—often doubly marginalized.
  • Irish Catholics: Targeted and policed due to their numbers and suspected threat, sometimes allied (in fear-mongering narratives) with enslaved Africans.
  • African Catholics: Often overlooked by authorities; many enslaved people brought from Catholic regions of Africa or former European colonies.
  • Indigenous Catholics: Feared as potential allies with French or Spanish imperial rivals.
  • “The majority of Catholics, certainly in the 17th century...were Irish. They were African, and they were indigenous.” (20:26, Dr. Juster)

6. Material Culture: Surviving Traces (26:13)

• Catholicism’s distinctive material culture—rosaries, crucifixes, statues—suffered from iconoclastic destruction but also adapted.
• Small devotional objects survived as portable, easily hidden emblems of faith.
  • “The rosary becomes the probably most important object that a colonial Catholic or an English Catholic in general can own…” (28:30, Dr. Juster)
• Larger objects were sometimes repurposed in Protestant churches, producing hybrid spaces.
  • “Objects that began their lives as Catholic objects and then became repurposed as Protestant objects absolutely fascinated me.” (32:59, Dr. Juster)

7. Religious Hybridization: Shared Rituals and Home-Based Practices (35:45)

• Both Protestants and Catholics in under-resourced colonial environments domesticated religious rituals—a practice that upset clergy seeking authority.
  • “This domestication of ritual becomes a really pervasive fact of colonial religious life that affects both Protestants and Catholics...” (39:17, Dr. Juster)

8. Funerals and Final Rites as Contested Terrain (40:54)

• Funerals, more than baptisms or weddings, became tense religious flashpoints, deeply symbolic of belonging and posthumous dignity.
  • “To die well and to bury well is one of the most cherished, cherished goals of Christians in this period.” (41:03, Dr. Juster)
• Denial of burial was a particularly cruel aspect of violence against enslaved Africans.
  • “One of the cruelest fates that could await an enslaved African of any religious conviction was death at sea during the middle passage, when dead bodies were simply tossed overboard and there was no way to mark that burial site...” (43:56, Dr. Juster)

9. Patterns and the Role of Women (45:38)

• Despite wide diversity in Catholic experience, two themes emerge:
  • Domestication of Faith: Most Catholic religious life centered in the home.
  • Central Role of Women: Women sustained Catholic practice—hosted secret priests, maintained ritual objects, led prayers, oversaw burials.
    • “At every sort of point along the lifetime of a Catholic, from birth to death, women are presiding over doing the organizational work, doing the commemorative work, doing the communal work of gathering people together in these households.” (48:54, Dr. Juster)

10. Historical Silences and Interpretative Challenges (50:00)

• Cautions that much of the historical record comes from hostile or uninterested sources; urges readers to approach these stories with humility and imagination.
  • “So much of what we know about these people's lives does come to us from tainted sources, from sources...who did not understand them, did not respect them, and wanted to destroy them.” (50:00, Dr. Juster)

11. Dr. Juster’s Next Project (52:08)

• Hints at research plans focusing on the Wesley brothers’ failed ministry in colonial Georgia, likely with continued themes of religion, gender, and laity-clergy conflict.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the anti-Catholic myth vs. reality:
  • "Why this disjuncture between this overheated rhetoric and this record of fairly benign, even permissive practice on the ground?" (04:20, Dr. Juster)
• On the limits of pluralism:
  • “Pluralism...has had this other connotation. It has tended to be viewed as a teleological process...that somehow leads us inexorably to...freedom of religion. That's a story that is far too neat, I think, and far too one dimensional.” (07:00, Dr. Juster)
• On women’s centrality:
  • “At every sort of point along the lifetime of a Catholic, from birth to death, women are presiding over...gathering people together in these households.” (48:54, Dr. Juster)
• On historical silences:
  • “We really do have to create a kind of imagined bridge between our own selves as scholars and researchers and interpreters and the lives of people whose existence in the records is itself a mark of the violence done to them.” (51:07, Dr. Juster)
• On religious hybridization:
  • “This domestication of ritual becomes a really pervasive fact of colonial religious life that affects both Protestants and Catholics...” (39:17, Dr. Juster)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:28 – Dr. Juster's Introduction & Book Motivation
• 06:26 – Pluralism vs. Coexistence
• 09:22 – Tracking Catholics Through Adversarial Records
• 14:13 – What Set Catholics Apart / Practicing in Secret
• 20:05 – Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Catholic Colonials
• 26:13 – Material Culture: Surviving Objects & Hybridization
• 35:45 – Hybridization & Shared Rituals among Protestants and Catholics
• 40:54 – Funerals as Battlegrounds
• 45:38 – Patterns: Domestication of Faith & Role of Women
• 50:00 – Silences in the Record; Interpretative Cautions
• 52:08 – Future Research Plans

Takeaway

Dr. Juster’s work reframes the story of Catholicism in English America as one of inventive, often invisible survival in the shadow of both official suspicion and historical erasure. The episode offers listeners a new appreciation for the diversity of American religious experience, the importance of material and home-based devotional practice, and the deep interpretative challenges of working with adversarial and limited sources—while foregrounding the pivotal role women played in sustaining faith amid adversity.