CARA's Story

Although usually considered a product of the Church’s increasing openness to science and research resulting from the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965), CARA’s origins go back even farther. As early as 1951 the superiors of U.S. missionary institutes called for a national research center to help reshape the missioner’s role in the emerging Third World churches. But the immediate impetus for such an organization was an article in 1961 by Richard Cardinal Cushing, on “The Modern Challenge of the Missions,” in the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston. 

Subsequently the major superiors of mission-sending orders voted about $5,000 to evaluate the need for “A Catholic Center for Coordinated Research and Cooperation.” A study group chaired by Rev. Frederick McGuire, CM, executive secretary of The Mission Secretariat and later both a founding CARA board member and director of development, and including CARA’s future first executive director, Rev. Louis J.
Luzbetak, SVD, and eight other distinguished members including men and women religious from U.S. mission-sending societies, delivered their favorable report in late 1963. 

CARA was officially incorporated in the District of Columbia on August 5, 1964. Its founding board of directors included Archbishop (later Cardinal) John P. Cody as head, four other members of the hierarchy including Bishop (later Archbishop) Fulton J. Sheen of the Propagation of the Faith, the presidents of the Catholic Church Extension Society, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men’s Institutes in the USA, and the Conference of Major Religious Superiors of Women’s Institutes in the USA, two women religious superiors, the director of the Latin American Bureau of what is now the U.S. Catholic Conference, the executive secretary of the Mission Secretariat, and the executive directors of the National Council of Catholic Men, the National Council of Catholic Women, and Serra International. 

CARA’s founding documents established the principles that have guided the organization ever since. In summary form, these are to gather new information and to store, retrieve, and disseminate it for practical use by Church decision makers. It is doubtless true that because of changes in the Church-such as the decreasing size of religious institutes and their foreign mission involvement-CARA’s present areas of emphasis are somewhat different from what might have been originally envisioned by the founders. But these broadly-stated principles established a wide umbrella under which CARA has been able to work most comfortably and productively. Two additional themes soon became CARA hallmarks: absolute
independence and objectivity. As one commentator put it, CARA’s goal is “to search dispassionately for
truth.” 

Originally, CARA was located in a townhouse at 3620 12th Street, in Northeast Washington, near The Catholic University of America. The new center soon settled into more appropriate quarters at 1717 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., the building of the then-Georgetown University Research Center. This is an area called “research row” next door to the Brookings Institution and other leading think tanks. It was also close to offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, predecessor to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/U.S. Catholic Conference before its new headquarters was built in 1989.