UNITED States legal scholar Helen Alvare says Catholics must champion an “unafraid family policy that promotes stable, long-term marriages, that does not exclude but promotes what is best for children”.
She said the Church’s teachings and norms on sex, marriage and parenting promote the freedom and abundance of life necessary to building a just society, especially for women and the poor.
“They’re the things that result in people having a more secure, stable existence,” she said.
Dr Alvare is an expert in family law who is cited by the US Supreme Court and advises the Holy See, the United Nations and the US Catholic Bishops Conference.
For decades, she has been a leading voice in the pro-life movement in the US and championed the Church’s position on families and relationships.
She spoke about the many challenges and opportunities facing her profession, the Church and society at the Assembly of Catholic Professionals sponsored by Australian Catholic University’s PM Glynn Institute at Brisbane’s Hilton Hotel yesterday.
Dr Alvare, an Irish-Cuban American, grew up grounded in a strong Catholic household but knocked back the label “cradle Catholic”.
“Cradle Catholic could imply that it was given to me and I just went with it – but I never just went with it,” she said with a laugh.
She cannot remember a time before her fascination with her faith.
She said a formative image came to mind – her dad, a “big, tough Cuban who didn’t put up with much”, on his knees every morning in the presence of Jesus and Mary.
“My disabled sister was his very special project,” she said.
“He was her strength.
“I looked to my dad as a model.
“Here’s this guy, a vice president of a big engineering firm, on his knees in prayer every morning.
“Right before he died… he said to me, ‘I’ve been talking about Jesus my whole life, and now I’m going to see Him this week.’
“That was the story every day with Dad… Christ was the horizon.”
After her schooling with “super smart” religious sisters, she thought she might have a vocation to live as a contemplative nun with the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters in Philadelphia.
Within hours, she said, the sisters had her out of there.
She moved to West Virginia and became the chaplain at a maximum security prison.
The prisoners were catcalling her so much, she shaved her head to look like a young man.
After a summer there, journeying with prisoners and their families, she decided she wanted to “do something” and entered the legal profession.
But she did not just want to be an expert, she wanted to be the best.
“I remember people thinking, even then, ‘she’s Catholic and she’s really into it – so she can only be so smart’,” she said.
But that perception, she said, drove her to be better – “I have to know my data, I have to know my footnotes”.
“I have to be the smartest person in the room when I come in to say something controversial,” she said.
“So it really drove me to research, to sort of hold my head up high as a Catholic.”
Dr Alvare went on to marry her husband Brian, who died suddenly two years ago, and they raised three children together.
“I had no idea what was needed when I first had children,” she said.
She said one of the mistakes she made was “thinking that if I did everything I grew up doing—going to church, holy days (of obligation), processions, prayers at meals— faith would take hold by osmosis”.
“You have to have rich conversations.
“And I had to discipline myself to be ready for those conversations.
“You can’t wait until they’re bringing home difficult stuff and you’re going, ‘No, that’s not right,’ – you have to start early.
“I would have had more conversations about Christ from an early point.
“Now, my kids are solid in their faith, but it wasn’t like that earlier.”
Dr Alvare’s daughter had been one of the 60,000 people adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament at the US National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.
She said the congress had been part of a wider success story in the US on the Eucharist.
The now-infamous 2019 Pew Research that showed only one third of US Catholics believed in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist had lit a fire under the USCCB.
They had since turned it around with later research, raising it to two-thirds.
Dr Alvare said she had seen a lot of progress in her own parish.
“We’ve been talking about the Eucharist for years now,” she said.
Asked about the family and life crises happening in Australia and the US, Dr Alvare said there was no “silver bullet”, but many problems like abortion, domestic violence, suicide rates could be helped with a family policy that was not “individualistic”.
She said there were social forces that made decision makers “afraid to say, ‘it’s good for a child to know and be known by the people who brought him or her into the world in a stable, long-lasting marriage’”.
“This is not to insult the heroic work of single parents, it’s not to insult same-sex attracted people – none of that – it’s to say, ‘are we going to take care of children?’,” she said.
“Family structure is a bigger social divider than race in the United States.
“Race does not account for differences the way family structure does.
“So an unafraid family policy, and it doesn’t have to be, ‘everybody should be picket fence happy’, it doesn’t have to exclude people, but it does have to promote stable, long-term marriages.”
Outside of family law, Dr Alvare has become an expert in religious freedom.
She had read about the Church in Australia engaged in debates about the future of religious freedom as it grappled with anti-discrimination legislation.
Her advice to the Church was to be “confident and positive”.
She said the evidence sided with the Church.
“We have a lot of evidence that our message and our norms are a tremendous benefit to people,” she said.
She said the Church promoted equality, dignity and freedom – society “needs us”.
Religious freedom, she said, was a human right and it required groups, institutions and individuals to stand up and bear witness to all the good works of the Church.
