Carolyn Caveny (center), wearing her Cheverus Medal, poses with her parish "family" at St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Dorchester. Pilot photo/Wes Cipolla
DORCHESTER -- On the tabernacle behind the altar of St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Dorchester is a symbol that is not often found in Catholic churches.
It is an image of a slender bird. Its feet are pointed forward, but its delicately curved head is pointed backward. This image, the sankofa, originates from the country of Ghana in West Africa. Sankofa is the Akan word meaning "retrieve." The word's pictorial symbol is a bird that is moving forward but looking back, always remembering its past. It is a fitting symbol for the Black Catholic community that St. Katharine Drexel represents.
"It's a symbol from God," said Carolyn Caveny, who has served as executive assistant to the parish for almost a decade.
Caveny, 86, has been part of Boston's Black Catholic community for over 50 years. She has seen the parishes of St. John-St. Hugh, St. Philip, and St. Francis de Sales in Dorchester and Roxbury merge to become St. Katharine Drexel in 2005. Before that, she was a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, one of only a handful of white sisters teaching in Boston's predominantly Black Catholic schools during the racial tensions that gripped the city in the 60s and 70s. She was a woman religious for over 40 years before separating from the congregation in the 2000s in order to serve the Church in lay ministry. She is still close with the sisters, who remain an important part of her life. Like the sankofa, she looks back on her life and tries to understand where God has taken her.
"What I have seen and heard is that God has blessed me," she said. "I have had an extraordinary life, and I don't try to figure out why I came in 1971 to St. Joseph Community School. I don't try to figure out why I'm a member of a Black Catholic parish."
Caveny admits she can be "a little hard-headed" at times, but she has done her best to cooperate with the Holy Spirit. She knows she's "not going to be messing around with God's mysterious gifts."
For her contributions to St. Katharine Drexel, Caveny was among 150 people who received the Cheverus Award in 2025. The annual archdiocesan awards, named after Boston's first bishop, honor those who have given long-time service to the Church.
"She has worked tirelessly to help make St. Katharine Drexel what we are today," wrote Father Oscar Pratt, the parish pastor, when nominating Caveny for the award. "I can think of no one more deserving of this award."
For her, the award was not only for herself but for all of St. Katharine Drexel Parish.
"The recognition of dedicated service to God's people, in a real sense, is the dedicated service of the parishioners here to each other, and also to our outreach as it relates to social justice," she said.
She is part of a five-person team that meets every two weeks to discuss happenings in the parish, and a member of the 10-person team responsible for the upcoming Drexel Village housing project, which will provide 217 units of affordable housing on the site of the St. Katharine Drexel Parish Center in Roxbury. The generosity of the parish has become "evident" to her.
"I'm not talking about financial generosity alone," she said. "I'm talking about how people care about what happens to other people."
Caveny grew up in an all-white community in Syracuse, New York.
"Segregation was alive and well," she said. "It still is."
She first came to Roxbury in 1971, a few years after she professed her vows, to work on her master's degree in philosophy at Newton College of the Sacred Heart. She said her vocation was "God's invitation at that particular time."
"I didn't know at that time that was a mysterious gift," she said.
Sister Sylvia Thibodeaux of the Sisters of the Holy Family, one of the oldest Black religious orders in the U.S., enlisted her to teach seventh and eighth grade at St. Joseph Community School. St. Joseph, St. John, and St. Francis schools were set up in Boston as an initiative of the National Black Sisters' Conference. Most of the students, and most of the sisters teaching them, were Black.
"I was welcomed, I was taught, I was loved," Caveny said. "I had expectations. And the first thing I noticed, the first thing that intrigued me, was Black spirituality."
She now considers Black spirituality to be "a precious gift" in the Church.
"In Black spirituality, there is no dualism, so you can be happy and sad at the same time," she said. "You can also hope in the midst of despair, and the continued fight for freedom continues through the teachings, through the lives, the faith, and hope of the ancestors."
Her work in the schools coincided with Boston's desegregation busing crisis and extreme tension between the city's Black and white residents.
"It was very clear within a couple of months that the children and youth I had in seventh and eighth grade were absolutely my focus," she said. "In that school and the other two schools, you were expected to thrive."
One of her former students is now a parishioner at St. Katharine Drexel.
"What stands out for me is the success of all of these young people coming from these three schools," she said.
During weekly meetings at St. Joseph's, students would say "the African Pledge." Since Caveny was white, she wasn't sure if she should say the Pledge along with her students. Eventually, she had no problem saying it. The community had welcomed her as one of their own. The Pledge went, "We will work, study, and listen, so we may learn, so we may teach."
Teaching children was Caveny's lifelong calling. In 1988, she became director of student support services at Emmanuel College. She led the TRIO Student Support Services Project for first-generation college students from "economically disadvantaged backgrounds." Disliking that label for students in need, she changed the program's name to Success for the Self-Determined Student. She later served Emmanuel as an assistant dean of academic advising, where her interest in social justice and anti-racism advocacy continued. After leaving Emmanuel, she fell and broke her wrist in three places. That didn't stop her from volunteering at St. Katharine Drexel.
"I am determined," she said.
Caveny still lives in Roxbury. Seeing how much the neighborhood has changed over the past half-century has been "bittersweet."
"In some ways, the effects of racism are still alive and well," she said. "They're alive and well in housing situations, they're alive and well in school systems, they're alive and well in how people are not represented to the degree that they should be in the Church, in the city, in the state, etc."
A woman in the neighborhood once asked Caveny, "Are you Catholic?"
Caveny replied that she is Catholic "with a small c," referencing the word's meaning as "universal."
"I follow the teachings of Jesus," she told the woman, "the poor Jew from Nazareth, who excluded no one."