John Carr is the founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. He served as director of the Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, secretary for the Office of Social Concerns for the Archdiocese of Washington, executive director of the White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter, and director of the National Committee for Full Employment under Coretta Scott King.
After fifty years working for peace and justice, Carr retired in December 2025. At a retirement event hosted by the Initiative, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA Kerry A. Robinson called Carr “our collective conscience,” while New York Times columnist David Brooks said he was part of the “best argument for Christianity.” Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, praised him as “a man of faith,” even when facing failure. Carr spoke with Commonweal senior writer Heidi Schlumpf on the occasion of his retirement. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Heidi Schlumpf: Minnesota is your home state. What are your thoughts about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement there—and the response from Minnesotans?
John Carr: I grew up in south Minneapolis, not far from the recent killings [of Renee Good and Alex Pretti], less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed and near where Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota Speaker of the House, was killed. Annunciation [the site of a mass shooting last year] was the next parish over from ours. It was a neighborhood where everybody cared about each other. I’m really happy to see that part of “Minnesota nice” come back, where people stand in solidarity and take care of each other. That’s what I learned at an early age. I didn’t know what solidarity was, but it was in the air I breathed.
What is going on there now is almost unimaginable. There are two things that strike me. One is the brutality, the violence, and the killing. The other is the blatant lying, the demonizing of people and making stuff up. It’s like all the boundaries have been crossed, in the use of force and the use of language. I am absolutely appalled and heartbroken to see my neighborhood affected by this, and I am encouraged to see the community and the Church stand up.
Faces often are more important than facts. This violence now has faces: Alex Pretti and Renee Good and a five-year-old boy in a bunny hat. Our leaders have responded as pastors, defending their people, and that has really been encouraging. My hope is that this could be the beginning of a coming-together for our bishops and others to defend the dignity of every child of God. It should be what unites us across our ideological, political, and ecclesial divisions. The idea that we could stand up for human dignity together is a powerful force. It might be a breaking point for people who, for a variety of reasons, supported Trump, but are tired of apologizing and are exhausted by all this.
HS: When you look back over the five decades of your work, do you see the country and world as more peaceful and just than it was in the 1970s when you began?
JC: Sometimes it’s not easy to look back. A lot of the things I worked on have been undermined or are at risk, but there were some remarkable achievements. The bishops’ conference played a key role in the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Child Tax Credit, defending the safety net—Medicaid and food stamps—and in things that don’t get a lot of attention, such as the land mines ban and arms control. I think we’d be better off if our leaders had listened to the bishops and their moral questions about the Iraq War. Still, there were some real contributions to the common good. But these are not good days. [The current administration’s] reckless leadership and indifference have undermined the principles of Catholic social teaching.
HS: Given the severe polarization today, do the same tactics you’ve used throughout your career—truthful discourse and conversation, negotiation and compromise, working across the aisle—work today?
JC: A lot has changed. You used to be able to get into the White House, the Senate, or the House to make your case to decision-makers. Now, it’s mostly about money and photo ops. Years ago, when Congress couldn’t agree on a budget, there were sequesters, which meant automatic cuts to the safety net. We got a meeting with President Obama. Bishop Ricardo Ramírez of Las Cruces said to the president, “You must have a different Bible in Washington. Because in my Bible, it says, whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me. And in Washington, it seems to say, whatever you do for the most of these, you do unto me. We want to protect the least of these.” The Obama White House said if we could persuade [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan to exempt the lifelines to the poorest families from the automatic cuts, we’ll go along. So we met with Paul Ryan, and made the same case. Together, they decided to exempt the lifelines from the automatic cuts.
Contrast that to today, where Trump and Vance and Musk have targeted the poorest, taking food and health care from families in America. And then they went after churches to try to intimidate them, saying the bishops cared about migrants for the money. How outrageous. Today there is a fear of challenging your party or your ecclesiastical faction. Republicans don’t want to talk candidly, visibly, about Trump. Democrats are reluctant to criticize the culture-war emphasis of their party, and people within the Church are often reluctant to take on their allies, even when they’ve made mistakes. So, the work of the Initiative, which is about dialogue and building bridges, is more important than ever.
The [USCCB’s] Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship document from a while ago had a good summary of what we need to do. We need to be political without being partisan. Politics is where important decisions are made. We need to be involved. But we shouldn’t be the chaplain for any party, cheerleader for any candidate, apologists for any administration. We should be principled, but not ideological. We shouldn’t give up on our fundamental principles on life and dignity, but we should be willing to work with anybody—those who agree with us or who don’t—to advance other principles, and to pursue the common good. We should be civil, but not silent. Calling people names is not a way to persuade, and sometimes you have to challenge your allies. You have to speak up. We need to be engaged, but not used. I think one temptation is to trade access for independence, to get close to power.
One thing we’ve learned at the Initiative is that it’s better to look outward than inward all the time. Pope Francis said that a Church fixated on its internal workings is sick. I don’t think young people—or many of us—are interested in something that is preoccupied with its own internal problems. We want to be about the mission; we want to be about the Gospel. We have found at the Initiative that there’s a hunger for the moral vocabulary of Catholic social teaching, that there’s a thirst for genuine dialogue in the midst of polarization, and that there’s an openness, especially with the young people and Latinos we convene, to a different way of dealing with faith in public life.
HS: In your work, you have been nonpartisan and also consistent, working for justice for everyone from the unborn to immigrants to poor children. Does that political strategy work today?
JC: You’ve got to stick to your principles. There are people who get up every morning and say, I’m a Republican or I’m a Democrat. I’m a Trumper or I’m an anti-Trumper. And their frame changes all the time. We [in the Church] have the great advantage of looking at the world through a different lens. We focus on human dignity—of the unborn, the undocumented, poor kids, hungry families around the world, people on death row. The politics, the leaders, the ideologies change, but those fundamental principles don’t.
I think single-issue politics have been theologically questionable, pastorally divisive, and politically counterproductive. That’s true on the left and the right. I’m pro-life, and I think some elements of the pro-life movement have made a bad bargain with Trump. I don’t think he believes in it. He wants to compromise on the Hyde Amendment. He is not dealing with pharmaceutical abortions. He thinks IVF is great. With Trump’s judges, the pro-life movement won the court, but it might have lost the country; there are more abortions now than before. On the other hand, there are two litmus tests in the Democratic Party: you have to be pro-abortion, and you have to be anti-Trump. They’ve lost two of the last three [presidential] elections, so that’s not working.
One of my fears is that the pro-life community focuses on the humanity of the unborn child, and forgets the humanity of the woman facing a pregnancy. And the pro-choice movement focuses on the rights of the woman, and forgets about the humanity of the unborn child. It’s better to think consistently about human life.
HS: What should Catholics who want to have an effect on politics today do? It’s easy to get frustrated and cynical.
JC: A faithful Catholic could not be nominated or appointed to a major office in either political party right now. For Democrats, abortion would be a disqualifying issue. For Republicans, if you’re not for deportations, or not anti-immigrant, or against capital punishment, that would be a disqualification. I’ve been quoted as saying we’re politically homeless. I think that’s a statement of failure, not purity. It means we haven’t persuaded people to our convictions about human life and dignity. That means we need to be more involved in your political party, to fight for the values you share and challenge the values you disagree with.
My mom started a pro-life pregnancy center. She was a conservative Republican. But she did not think Medicaid was the source of all evil, or that Women, Infants, and Children programs were “big government.” She thought they were lifelines for the women she served and wanted her party to stand with them. Trump did not campaign on taking food from hungry families or health care from sick families. I don’t think people who voted for Trump voted for that. They were mad about other things. But the ideological straitjacket that people are in has put us in a position where you can’t even have a dialogue.
Part of it is fear and intimidation. People are afraid to dissent from the party line. Some of it is money in politics, but also sometimes in the Church. In the Church, we used to depend on the small contributions of millions of people at Sunday Mass. Now it seems like there’s always a capital campaign, and we depend on generous gifts from generous people. That’s great—our initiative has been supported by people like that. But it means you spend a lot of your time with affluent people. Our boards, our governance are often full of rich and powerful people. And the voices of the people we serve are not represented.
One of the great things about Pope Leo is that his focus on the poor from the very beginning might get us to rethink some of that. I have very high hopes for Pope Leo. You can imagine what somebody who worked on Catholic social teaching felt when I heard he had chosen the name Leo to lift up the social teaching of the Church. And I was so pleased that right from the beginning, in his first teaching document, he focused on placing the poor at the center of our lives, our faith, our society.
I have friends on the right who resisted Pope Francis. They would say “he doesn’t know us, he doesn’t know the United States, he doesn’t know capitalism, he doesn’t get us.” And in twenty-four hours, the cardinals picked an American who chose the name Leo, who talks about the poor—and he knows us. So I think now the question is not whether the pope gets us, but whether we get the pope—whether we’re willing to think and act differently, as he challenges all of us to do.
HS: Another issue that has affected the Church’s credibility over the years of your career has been the response, or sometimes lack of response, to clergy sex abuse. You came forward to say that you experienced sexual abuse and harrassment by a priest when you were a seminarian, and that contributed to struggles with alcoholism. Did this challenge your faith?
JC: The clergy sexual-abuse crisis affected me personally, professionally, and institutionally. I worked in two archdioceses for many years and for bishops, including bishops who had failed in this regard. But I had not acknowledged, really, what had happened to me as a young seminarian. We were doing a series of dialogues around clergy sex abuse, and I was talking to journalists, and I heard myself say, “Silence and denial is destructive.” Then it struck me that I had my own silence. I had my own denial. I hadn’t told [my wife] Linda, my kids, or my parents. So I talked about what happened to me. It helped me, and it helped others.
Sometimes I hear priests say, “It was a long time ago, it wasn’t that bad, it was a minority of priests. It’s time to move on, time for healing and reconciliation.” And I want to say: it was bad, really bad. It affected many, many people. There were too many priests involved. The costs continue in people’s lives, and especially in the trust, credibility, and, frankly, the finances available to the Church. We need change. We need reform. We need to overcome the clericalism that made this possible. I think there have been enormous strides, but there still are elements of clericalism that minimize or ignore the costs of the crisis.
I went into treatment [for alcoholism] during the worst of the public focus on the crisis. So it’s not a cause, but recovery required me to deal with it. The irony, of course, is that both things require honesty and accountability: facing your failures, making amends, and trying to make things better. So there are lessons there.
HS: As a parent, grandparent, and someone who cares about the next generation, are you concerned about the decline in religious involvement and the rise of the “nones,” including in the Catholic Church? Any ideas about solutions?
JC: It is a concern. It’s very mixed in our family. Some are very serious about their faith; other members of my family, not so much. For them, the sexual-abuse crisis is a big part of it. I’ve learned that lectures and shaking your finger doesn’t work. When I was worried about my kids drinking, my dad said, “John, they don’t listen. They watch.” I think that’s also true about faith.
They don’t listen, they watch. So we need to provide a good example.
I still have hope and the conviction that the principles of Catholic social teaching—human dignity, solidarity, a priority for the poor, the dignity of workers, the care for creation, the common good—offer a path forward, beyond the damage of the moment, the divisions of this time, both for our Church and our society. I believe that we have the moral framework that can provide a path to a much better place.
As a recovering alcoholic, you learn in recovery that you can overcome where you’ve been. You have a dependence on a loving God. You’re not in charge, but you are responsible for your own actions. You face your failures and weaknesses, you make amends. You try to live your life one day at a time in service to others, trying to do God’s will, and you do that together. And so, for twenty years, I’ve found that the Twelve Steps, Catholic faith, and Ignatian spirituality overlap—and I think there are some lessons there for our Church as well. Acknowledge your failures, make amends. Try to move forward, and do it together.
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