When people needed saving, Carl was there

Phoenix has lost one of its best first responders. The Rev. Carl Carlozzi — Father Carl to anyone who knew him more than five minutes — died Sunday after a yearlong battle with esophageal cancer. Father Carl baptized my first child when he was rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Phoenix. But that’s not why I’m writing about him.

Father Carl died of the same cancer that took my father, which makes it personal. But that’s not why I’m writing about him.

Father Carl called me now and then to encourage me when I was writing about controversial topics he knew would bring out the screamers. But that’s not why I’m writing about him.

Father Carl was the rarest of men — a priest who devoted his life to the rescue of people when they needed it most.

This is a guy who was working in one of Arizona’s largest and wealthiest Episcopal churches in 1993, when he felt the call to become a volunteer chaplain. For the next nine years, he was on call 24/7 for the Phoenix Fire Department before leaving the pulpit to take on the job full time.

He ministered to both firefighters and citizens in times of crisis. He ministered to people of all faiths and to those with none. He was in Oklahoma City, after the federal building was bombed, and in New York, after 9/11.

Year after year, he has been there at scenes of traffic carnage and shooting horrors, at pool drownings and house fires. In hospital rooms and waiting rooms and living rooms — and in firehouses — he has been there when people needed him. Even when they didn’t realize they needed him.

“You see how fragile life is,” he once said. “Doing this, you see it every day. Most of the time, when my beeper goes off, I’m going to see someone die.”

When a toddler lay crushed beneath a city bus, he was there, kneeling in the street to administer last rites.

When two children were killed in a fire, he was there, kneeling beside their parents to offer consolation.

When a young man threatened to jump off a freeway overpass, he was not only there, but he talked the guy out of it. He told the man he’d never had to talk a crazy man off of a bridge before and it wasn’t in his theological training, and that he’d likely be in trouble with the bishop, until finally the guy asked him, “Who’s helping who here?”

“We had this wonderful conversation, and then the negotiators came and got him off,” he would later say.

Sometimes he prayed with people. Sometimes he talked. Sometimes he just listened. “All you can do,” he once said, “is be with them in their pain.”

Father Carl devoted the better part of his life to search and rescue. Of families left behind, witnesses left scarred, rescuers left to figure out how to cope.

Perhaps he best summed up his own life in 1995, while standing in the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

“We want to bring hope, find life, give comfort,” he said quietly.

And he did.