ANDOVER – She has a piece of the Great Wall of China, brought to her by a vacationing priest who chipped it off when no one was looking. He knew about Joan Stinson Carney’s rock collection.

“When he handed it to me, I said, ‘You’re still alive? You’re lucky they didn’t shoot you!'” Carney said, remembering her reaction 20 years ago.

She’s had to set different ground rules over the years as the well-intentioned have added to her collection. Please, nothing too big. (The first rock given to her by a friend was the size of a box of cards.) Please, nothing bought. (Her third rock, from another priest, was a polished chocolate-colored Kentucky stone that clearly came from a store.)

And please, no damaging monuments or architecture on her behalf.

Carney, 66, started her collection back in the early 1980s. At the time, she cooked dinner for eight priests in residence, and their guests, at St. Paul Catholic Church in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass.

“They were so great,” Carney said. When the men went on vacations, “they just wanted to bring back a souvenir, but I felt guilty. They didn’t have much money.”

She finally suggested that they simply bring her a keepsake rock. They did, and the habit spread around to her vacationing friends and family. Carney figures she has 800 or 900 rocks. After a move back to Andover two years ago, most were stored temporarily in Pennsylvania. Her son is bringing them up this summer when he comes for a family reunion.

Carney has one she’s always kept close, a rock blessed by Pope John Paul II in 1984. On her way to meet him, a St. Paul’s church secretary found the small, brownish pebble on the street in Rome and later asked the pope, “Would you mind blessing this for my friend? He said, ‘Not at all,'” Carney said.

She has a piece of Blarney Castle, where the Blarney Stone is kept in Ireland, a sizable piece of the Berlin wall with red and black graffiti in German on both sides and a rock from the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Two elderly aunts brought her a rock from the red-light district in Amsterdam, not realizing where they’d taken an evening stroll.

“I have a rock from Jim Morrison’s grave, my son told me I had to mention,” Carney said.

Her newest addition, a rock from Alcatraz, arrived Thursday with a Mother’s Day card.

She has a wish list: the Rock of Gibraltar, Stonehenge and Plymouth Rock. But not pieces of the real things; rocks near the monuments will do.