Faithful Citizenship

in 2016:

Is There Common Ground to Pursue

the Common Good?

Join us June 24, 2016 at 7:00pm

This year, Catholic Common Ground Initiative will be presenting Sr. Helen Prejean with the 2016 Bernardin Award. Our speaker for the evening, John Carr, will be addressing the timely issue of citizenship and common ground in this year of mercy.

Both Pope Francis and the US Catholic bishops insist, “Faithful citizenship is a virtue and participation in the political process is a moral obligation.” John Carr, the Director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, will explore what that means in the surprising and challenging politics of 2016. John served for more than two decades as the director of justice and peace efforts at the US Bishops’ Conference and as a Residential Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. He will examine the mission and message of Pope Francis in public life and offer some directions and dangers for both the Church and Catholics in this election year. John will also look at the promise and problems of Cardinal Bernardin’s call for a consistent life ethic and his search for common ground in a polarized nation and Church. Looking to the future, he will suggest where Catholics might find common ground to pursue the common good in US public life.

Sr. Helen Prejean, 2016 Bernardin Award Recipient

Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on the death penalty and helping to shape the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to state executions.She considers herself a southern storyteller. Since 1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied six men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some of those executed were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, which was released by Random House in December of 2004. Sr. Helen is presently at work on another book entitled River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey.

John Carr, Presenter of the 2016 Murnion Lecture

John Carr is the founder and director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. The Initiative, launched in 2013, is a unique effort to share the wisdom of Catholic Social Thought more deeply and broadly and to help educate and encourage a new generation of Catholic lay leaders in carrying out their vocation to be “salt, light and leaven” in public life. Carr also is Washington correspondent of America Magazine and its “Washington Front” columnist.

Carr is a long-time leader at the intersection of faith and public life in Washington. For more than two decades, he served as director of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development. Before his time at the USCCB, John served Cardinal Hickey’s Secretary of Social Concerns in the Archdiocese of Washington, as Education Director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and as Legislative Coordinator for the Archdiocese of St. Paul/Minneapolis. Outside the Catholic Church, John served as executive director of the White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter and as director of the National Committee for Full Employment, a civil rights–labor–religious coalition led by Coretta Scott King. Carr retired from the USCCB in 2012 to accept a Residential Fellowship on “religion and politics” at the Institute of Politics of Harvard University.