To bolster his confidence and prepare him to practice law someday, his father enrolled him in an acting class when he was 6 years old. He embraced stagecraft as his vehicle to overcome what others viewed as a handicap, and he preached storytelling to damaged veterans as a means, as he put it, to “open up the floodgates of post-traumatic stress.”

In 1977, he founded the National Theater Workshop of the Handicapped in New York City and Belfast, Me. It spawned the Wounded Warriors Writers Workshop in 2003 and the Academy for Veterans, which helps soldiers disabled in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to rebuild their lives. Both are based at Georgetown University in Washington.

“With the disabled, you need a guide dog, you need a wheelchair, and people get that,” Father Curry said in an interview with Ecumenica, a journal of theater and performance, in 2011. “But you also need your spirit lifted. You need to make art. You need to tell your story. You need to create.”

With Constance J. Milstein, a developer and philanthropist, Father Curry founded the Dog Tag Bakery in Washington last year to teach wounded veterans a craft. He also wrote two cookbooks on elemental comfort food, “The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking” (1995) and “The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking: A Year of Our Soups” (2002), laden with recipes and spiced with anecdotes.

“I must warn you that I adhere to the Jesuit distinction between myth and truth,” he wrote, invoking the definition of a myth as “that which never happened, but is forever true.” He recalled a priest’s regaling an audience with a story, after which an eyewitness reminded him that the event had not happened exactly that way — to which the priest replied, “Hey, pal, you tell the story exactly the way it happened and see if you get a laugh.”