On hope and the family: Professor Helen Alvaré unpacks her journey of faith

Shortly before she delivered the 2024 Tim Fischer Oration, Professor Helen Alvaré sat down with Don Smith from the Catholic Voice in Canberra to share her thoughts on faith and family issues. (The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

 CV: 2025 is a jubilee year for the Catholic Church with the theme “pilgrims of hope”. You’re on record as saying the Church still has beautiful things to offer despite the well-known difficulties of recent years. What are those beautiful things from your perspective?

Prof Alvaré: It’s interesting because hope has been a huge personal theme for me, and now it’s an ecclesial theme. I’ve been reading Charles Péguy’s The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. You must read it. For me, the main hope is that everything the human person most desires…the most fundamental desires [are] for justice, for love. Earlier in my life, I would have approached it more intellectually. Having grown older and going through various sufferings in life, my first answer is that for the fundamental desires of the human heart, an honest, deep and persistent investigation of Jesus Christ speaks to that in a way that nothing else does.

And another thing in a much more practical sense…is that there are very few credible international institutions – and it’s not like the Church [itself] hasn’t taken a few hits. But where would you find an institution or a figure like Pope Francis who defies all the angriest partisan battles…who’s defending the plight of the immigrant, or the unemployed, or talking about the need to reinstitute hope and youth, at the same time denouncing gender ideology, and standing firm on the pro-life issue? He defies all categories and transcends on behalf of the church…as the vicar of Christ. He’s not just a figure of unity, but he’s a figure of hope. People want to quibble – “I don’t like what he said yesterday” on this or that. “He’s not doing my issue enough.” You’ll hear that on what would be partisan sides of things. But if you really step back and think about the world, he, and therefore the church, is of hope at this particular time in history, given both international and domestic struggles.

CV: You’ve touched on your sufferings and journey in life. What have you learnt from it?

Prof Alvaré: The shame at selfishness when it so obviously was the wrong way to go. The only way to really live happily, in reality, is …to submit to God’s will and to shut up and spend time listening in prayer to what that might be. I don’t like saying it, but I think it’s true that I’ve learned the value of suffering. And I wouldn’t have said that before I lost my husband or before certain other family struggles. One of my favourite Pope Francis comments is that there isn’t much difference between humility and humiliation. I love that. I don’t think that’s widely quoted, but it hit me. Suffering, humility, and humiliation are related, but you have to begrudgingly say that it opens your eyes not just to your need for God but to all these people around you who are suffering too, with whom you can now commiserate and be in a whole different way.

CV: It’s said that “the family that prays together stays together”. Are we doing enough for those families where that’s not the case?

Prof Alvaré: No, no, no! I teach family law, and in the United States, family law and sociology are constantly feeding each other. It’s a circle. The data regarding the family that prays together has never been stronger…[especially for those families]… that have an integrated Catholic experience, [whose members] choose to marry, have marital childbearing, go to Mass and Catholic schools, and avoid divorce, cohabitation, abortion, and so on. Likewise, in the US, an integrated evangelical experience, an Orthodox Jewish experience, a Baptist experience…a true religious horizon within which your family lives and interprets the world, [also] matters. And that does include regular prayer.

I practically wanted to cry when something happened and one of my kids would say, ‘we have to stop and pray for them, right?’ That was just so great. I teach RCIA [Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults] and I had this one couple [who] had come from really no faith background at all. In the case of the one spouse, watching this person come to the faith …I was just with my jaw on the table! It’s always that way when you’re watching people convert. Flannery O’Connor said it’s like watching Lazarus rise from the dead every time somebody converts. I love that expression. And she’s right.

So, you know, it has to be an ongoing conversation in the household. You do the religious things, but then you converse about how they operate in the world. You take your children’s worldly experiences, and you show how these desires, these impulses, these intuitions, and these actions lead to Christ. You can’t just stop at the human.

CV: In a demanding career, how have you managed your faith? Has it taken a back seat to other demands?

Prof Alvaré: I can say now, when I look back I was guilty of careerism in the church in the earlier period. When I first started as a lawyer, I was a corporate litigator for a large firm. I represented the Diocese of Philadelphia but also all kinds of secular clients. And then I was just sort of aggressive for success as a lawyer. And very quickly, after four years, I was like, wow, is this all there is? I had a real depression. And I started to study theology because my way out of things is first intellectual. Spiritual is next. Right? But it was like, if I study about my faith, this will help me understand why this isn’t enough. I went into a master’s in theology and then three more years toward the doctorate, at which point I moved full time into the Bishops conference in the United States. But I’d say I was too flattered by being consulted by important people, by bishops, by the Vatican, by prestige press. And yes, I was always in service of the church and trying to be true, but I think…two things are true at the same time. I did some good, but I was also afflicted with careerism, whether outside of the church before or inside. And then I think as I got older and I saw how unattractive that was, and I didn’t like what I saw in myself.

I’m privileged to be a member of a papal dicastery and several papal commissions. I am honestly at the point where if none of them wanted me anymore, I’d be okay. That’s not my identity. And that if I can be of service to them for a while, that’s great. But if not, I don’t have to do that in order to have a relationship with God or a good life.

The other part of this was…regarding my kids. It was not a question of balancing but prioritising them. Some people would say if you work outside the home at all, that’s not good when you have kids. But I would disagree. The US Bishops Conference let me work from home…[even] in the 1990s. That’s a long time ago. They were way ahead on that…and gave me very generous maternity leaves. I’m sure I made mistakes, but I did prioritise [my children]. I don’t look back and go, ‘Oh no’, I didn’t spend enough time at home…because I did put [the family] first. And the way [I did that is through] … Catholic school girl discipline. I can come home from being out with friends on a Friday night at 9:30 pm and write a speech for two hours after that. When my kids were little, and I started to be a professor, and you had to publish, I would write from 4:45 am until they got up…and I published on schedule. Now, because my kids are grown up…I just have to say, ‘Helen, you’ve got to stop working today at one because you don’t need to work till seven. You’re allowed to cut the grass, you know.’ So that was that was part of my faith journey too.

CV: With religious freedoms under the spotlight, perhaps some Catholics might see that as an intellectual quest remote from their daily spiritual lives in their parishes. What would you say?

Prof Alvaré: Great question. What’s at stake at the moment that might be of interest to them…is that what the church has to offer on anything, immigration, poverty, the family norms, etc…is that society doesn’t want it and even wants to silence that witness. And they may say, ‘Oh, that’s okay. They’re not going to stop me from going to church…’ But that’s not thinking enough of the common good, and in particular, the issues I work on most, which tend to be family issues, sex, marriage, and parenting.

The Catholic Church in the United States, and maybe here too, is one of the last voices standing for sane policy, sane practices that are really the Good Samaritan principle applied to romantic and familial relationships. [If they say] ‘oh, it doesn’t really matter if we can’t teach our children those things in school or if Father so and so might even get into trouble saying to the local press or from the pulpit…that doesn’t really matter. They are really leaving the public discourse, the public square, to a new orthodoxy on these topics that the governments are increasingly adopting. [It’s] really harmful, especially to women and children and to the poor who suffer the loss of family norms more than others. People with money tend to get a little bit more of what they want. They get married more often, they stay married more often.

The Catholic Church in Lumen Gentium says God is pleased not to save us as individuals but as a community. And we’re also not supposed to, you know, hide our light under a bushel basket. To say, oh, it’s okay if the church is shut down, whether on immigration or on family norms, because I can still go to church and commune with God, would not be in tune with Catholic understanding about, yes, Love God, but [also] to love your neighbour as yourself.