WASHINGTON (RNS) — After decades of rubbing elbows with Washington and Catholic powerbrokers, working to further the Catholic Church’s social principles, John Carr has collected some stories. One he is willing to tell on the record goes like this: In the 1990s, Carr is in an elevator at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops headquarters, and a woman asks him what he does for the conference. He responds that he leads their justice and peace work.
“You’re not doing a very good job,” she tells him.
On Wednesday (Jan. 21), Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, took a moment at a celebration of Carr’s retirement after 50 years of work for the church to reassure Carr that the difficult moments showed not that he was “a glutton for punishment,” the cardinal said. “I think you’re a man of faith.”
“To see up close and personally the church’s defects and to keep at it, that’s fabulous,” Tobin told Carr at Georgetown University, where Carr was until last month co-director of the school’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, which he founded in 2013.
Carr’s association with the U.S. Catholic bishops was not only long, it was effective. While he led their peace and justice advocac …