Her story
Family
Carole Rossi was born in New Jersey, the daughter of Albert A. Rossi (1910–1981) and Amelia T. Rossi (1910–1993). She spent the first eleven years of her life in Camden, in an Italian-American family, before the family moved to the nearby suburb of Collingswood. Her grandparents were Italians who had emigrated to New Jersey and worked as migrant laborers.
In Collingswood the Rossis were among the few Italian-American families. Soon after they moved in, a next-door neighbor told her mother, “We wrap our garbage here.” She was still telling the story decades later. “I felt what prejudice can do, how hateful it is,” she told the Boston Globe in 1991. That same year she said, “I know how hurtful that can be. How unjust it is.”
She counted her mother among the people who shaped her work. She graduated from Camden Catholic High School in 1955.
Teacher and Sister
From 1960 to 1962 she taught as a lay teacher at St. Mary’s School in Williamstown, a school once staffed by the Dominican Sisters of St. Catharine, Kentucky. She entered that congregation in 1962. Entering begins a period of formation; profession is the taking of vows, and she professed hers in 1964. Her congregation counted her jubilees from that year: twenty-five years in 1989, which she marked with a prayer service at St. John’s Parish Hall in Collingswood, and sixty in 2024. In 2009 the St. Catharine Dominicans became part of the Dominican Sisters of Peace.
Her early ministry was in schools. She taught elementary school, spent time at St. Mary’s High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served as a high school principal in Chicago, and was personnel director for her congregation in St. Catharine. Her work took her from Chicago to Kentucky, Mississippi and Puerto Rico.
In the early 1960s she spent summers helping with minority voter registration in Mississippi. Later, while teaching at an affluent white suburban school, she and fellow teachers joined the marches in Memphis in support of the city’s sanitation workers. “That was a very radicalizing experience for me,” she said.
She traced her interest in community work to the classroom: “I began to realize that kid’s issues had a much broader base in community and family issues.” She went on to earn a master’s degree in education from DePaul University and a Master of Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School.
East Boston
She came to East Boston in the mid- to late 1970s, while studying theology at Andover Newton, and took a part-time position at Most Holy Redeemer Parish, working with its growing Latino community. With her was Sister Noel Doyle. The neighborhood, still largely Italian, reminded her of Camden. “It really felt like home,” she said, recalling older women sitting out on kitchen chairs in front of their houses and the sound of Italian in the streets.
These were the years of Boston’s school desegregation crisis. Carole led a group of clergy and lay people from the neighborhood’s churches, Catholic and Protestant, who set out to protect the Black children being bused to local schools. They attended community meetings, stood watch as the children got on and off the buses at the Maverick stop, and held a series of discussion sessions on racism and violence. It was her first experience of working closely with people who were not Catholic.
At the last of those sessions, as Carole remembered it, a woman named Esmeralda Sanchez arrived shaken. Someone had thrown a rock through the window of the room where her baby was sleeping, and the police had not protected her. “You people gonna sit around and talk about racism or do you want to do something about it?” she asked. The group marched to the police station and stayed until an officer was posted near her apartment. “We sometimes talk about that as kind of the moment of the birth of EBECC,” Carole said. The East Boston Ecumenical Community Council was founded in 1978. Carole is credited as its founder, with Sister Noel Doyle.
In 1982 the two sisters moved their work to Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church on Paris Street, where the Rev. Don Nanstad had recently become pastor. The church caretaker rigged up two telephones in a small alcove. On one side began Harbor Me, a group for abused women; on the other, the council. With Our Saviour’s, the council began sponsoring refugee families from Cambodia in the winter of 1982, and people from the neighborhood’s new communities soon came looking for help.
Not everyone welcomed them. As Cambodian and Vietnamese families arrived, rumors spread about the newcomers and about the council that helped them. “There was a lot of feeling against us,” Carole said. The council answered by building a staff from the communities it served. “I think as important as sponsoring, and more important than sponsoring, was EBECC’s commitment to be an intercultural staff,” she said: people “who spoke the language, knew the culture and were of the community.” After a street clash on Memorial Day weekend in 1985, the council launched Project Welcome to protect the neighborhood’s newcomers and encourage understanding across cultures. Carole, Don Nanstad and other volunteers organized community meetings and block patrols, the project hired two Southeast Asian outreach workers, and the council worked closely with the Boston police’s Community Disorders Unit. “They were here when you needed them,” Carole said of its officers. Among the people who built the council with her were Don Nanstad, the Cambodian organizer Sarann Phoung, Quyen Tran and Paula Virtue. In 1991 she named Don Nanstad, Mary Ellen Welch, Phil Giffee and her mother among her role models.
The council offered English classes, workshops on building understanding between cultures, help with housing, courts and landlords, a yearly Festival of Unity in Central Square, and a Cambodian New Year’s celebration it helped sponsor. It worked on affordable housing with its sister organization, the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing. By 1991 it had helped some 2,100 people, and in 1989 it had joined the United Way of Massachusetts Bay.
“I learned how to dance again in East Boston,” she said in 1991, remembering celebrations with fellow parishioners at Most Holy Redeemer. “I think it’s symbolic of the joy of life in this community.” In 1988 Boston City Councilor Rosaria Salerno honored her work with the council. In 1991 the Paulist Center in Boston gave her its Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice, and Women in Philanthropy named her among 23 women community leaders.
“The community is about everybody being accepted as he or she is,” she said, “not because you conform to what someone else thinks you should be.”
She left the council in 1993, and Kevin Whalen succeeded her as director. Looking back in 2010, she called those years “a convergence, it was a real convergence. You couldn’t have planned it.” The council’s work continues today as the East Boston Community Council.
Crystal Spring
In 1992 she and three other Dominican Sisters formed a small community at Crystal Spring in Plainville, Massachusetts, on land that James Toner had given to the St. Catharine Dominicans in 1949. An ecology center had opened there the year before. The sisters set out to live as a simple, sustainable community.
She taught adult education and earth literacy, and by 2008 she was the center’s administrator. When overflow from the springs flooded the grounds, the sisters piped it into a new filtering pond planted with water iris and mint, and used it to water the vegetable gardens. She watched for vernal pools so they could be registered and protected. “These pools serve as birthing places for salamanders and frogs,” she explained in 2004.
In 1998 she opened the Spiritual Journeys series at Bates College with a talk titled “Context for Wholeness and Holiness,” and in 2008 she took part in the Renewing Hope conference at Yale. Her conference biography that year named her interests as “Earth Literacy, vegetarian cooking, mindfulness meditation and developing deeper relationships with the whole community of life.”
Thirty-six acres at Crystal Spring were placed under a conservation restriction in 2008. In May 2023 the land opened to the public as the Crystal Spring Preserve, and Wildlands Trust, which now cares for it, credits “Sister Carole” among the sisters whose reverence for the land shaped it.
Later years
In later years she turned to a ministry of prayer for others. In April 2024 the Dominican Sisters of Peace celebrated her sixtieth jubilee, marking six decades in religious life.
