By Emilie Ng
CONFESSING fidelity to the Catholic Church and her teachings on moral issues makes Catholic advocate for marriage, family and religion and law professor, Helen Alvaré, unpopular.
But as far as Church in America is concerned, and now increasingly throughout the world as her works become more widely spread, Dr Alvaré is the key to unlocking a generation of intelligent women who can confidently reject the popular notion that birth control equates to greater freedom.
For almost 30 years, Dr Alvaré has painted a picture of the Church that houses intelligent men and women who know that the world is better on God’s side.
She has been a leading voice in opposing the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services mandate for its inherent attack on religious freedom, the United States Bishops’ public face in contesting moral legal issues in direct opposition to the Church’s teaching, and a pro-life advocate with a passion for empowering women to speak intelligently and courageously on laws allegedly purported as supporting women.
She has also been married with three children to her loving husband for almost 30 years.
Dr Alvaré visited Australia this month to give the keynote address on religious freedom as a “social good” at the John Paul II Australian Leaders Forum, in Melbourne.
Dr Alvaré’s academic record and professional connections is also nothing short of impressive.
She is faculty advisor to the law school’s Civil Rights Law Journal, chair of the Task Force on Conscience Protection of the Witherspoon Institute, president of the Chiaroscuro Institute, chair of the Catholic Women’s Forum, a consultor for the Pontifical Council of the Laity, an advisor to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and co-operates with the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations as a speaker and a delegate to various United Nations conferences concerning women and the family.
On paper she may seem intimidating, but in person Dr Alvaré is funny, bubbly, affectionate, and within five minutes of talking to her, instantly confirms why the Church needs a woman like her to bring victory to the Church in the public square.
Climbing steadily up the success ladder is not a priority for Dr Alvaré, who even looks blankly when asked about her “career trajectory”.
“It’s not about whether you’re going to rise up,” she said. “I did my Masters thesis when I was 27, 28, on service, on bishops as servants, but then I began to interpret that on my own, and once it’s service, then it’s very joyful, in my experience.
“And you’re not worried about your place.
“That way, in the American legal academy I will never be celebrated, because I’m a pro-lifer, and that’s not acceptable. And now in particular because of my writing on marriage, very unacceptable. But I don’t care.”
Her emergence as one of the Church’s most public advocates for a pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage and pro-religion culture began at her Law School graduation in 1984.
After four years studying economics – “the tough program at my college” – and continuing on to law school for another three, Dr Alvaré saw into the future and was disappointed.
“The day I graduated Law School, I remember we had to write what we would be doing 10 years from now, and what would we like to do 10 years from now,” Dr Alvaré said. “We wrote a lengthy piece on that and we each passed it one person to the left in Law School.
“I wrote that I thought I would be stuck in a large law firm but I would prefer to be working for the Church. I grew up in a very Catholic home, and when I was in seventh or eight grade, I decided I always wanted to work for the Church.
“But I worked for a large law firm for three years and I kept saying, ‘Is this all there is?’ I was so depressed.”
There were two options – to honour the $100,000 and seven years’ worth of study that formed the foundations for a successful life as a top female lawyer, or to let faith and reason grow into a life of service for the Church.
“At that point, I just took a giant pay cut and I went to work for the Catholic bishops as a lawyer to do their Supreme Court work, and I said to myself, ‘I’m so perfectly happy’,” Dr Alvaré said.
She represented the US Catholic Bishops on moral legal issues.
The Church’s teachings, especially pertaining to moral issues of abortion, euthanasia, contraception, marriage and religious freedom, always seemed logical to Dr Alvaré.
“My faith always came through my head first. My recollection was, I thought that Catholicism was the most interesting thing of all the things there are,” she said. “It’s the best explanation for the world as I see it.”
But Dr Alvaré’s reputation as one of the more public figures mixing religion and politics was propelled by a private revelation from the Holy Spirit, not an intellectual experience of God.
“I was working for the bishops as a lawyer (in the early 1990s), and they needed somebody to be their public face on the difficult issues – sex, abortion, euthanasia, everything that’s contested now in Australia and around the world,” she said.
“I refused when they came to me. I didn’t want to be that public, and I wanted to finish my doctorate in Theology. I said no.
“I was at Mass one Sunday, and this is the only one time it’s happened so this makes me not crazy, and I was about to leave Mass with my husband, and I sort of understood this: ‘Turn around, kneel down, tomorrow you’re going to say yes’. And I was really shook up.
“So the next day I went and accepted it, and the man in charge of hiring asked if I got his letter asking me one last time to work for the bishops …,” Dr Alvaré said.
For the ordinary spokesperson, being the public face for defending the Church’s moral teachings, many of which are not protected by law in the US, would be a challenge, but not for Dr Alvaré.
“Yes it was hard, but because I knew it was true, it wasn’t difficult. It was fun, nothing but fun,” she said. “Before my daughter (Kate, 20) was born, for three years I travelled about 120 days a year, to every diocese except for one in the United States.
“And so I met all these people, all these priests, all these nuns, all these women running crisis pregnancy centres, all these post-abortive groups, and I would come home with more energy than I left with.
“So it was nothing but fun.”
Fun is one secret to Dr Alvaré’s accomplishments, but also a love for the inherent beauty stamped into the Church’s identity.
“I never get tired of looking and reading and thinking about the real assurance of the Church’s beauty,” she said. “And then I get to go and see people in the Church of the world, and they’re wonderful, you know, everywhere.
“I could get teary about it, but is there anything more beautiful than the radical equality of every person?
“Is there anything that makes your life easier than when you enter any situation, and it’s you, me, and we’re all in it together, at the same level with the same God?
“There’s no worries.”
With truth on her side, and with a finesse for apologetics, Dr Alvaré is now working with women who have been disappointed by the offers of so-called “freedom” to tell their stories with womenspeakforthemselves.com.
“The press looks at me sometimes and think, ‘Oh, it’s her’, so I need to empower lots and lots of women to be as confident as they should be,” she said. “We have a lot of great women.
“When I started pro-life in the late 1980s, when I entered, it was run by men.
“The national right-to-life committee, the Bishops’ office was run by a man, all of it.
“Now every pro-life group except one or two is run by women, and they’re wonderful.
“In my case, it’s enabling other women in particular to tell their experiences, which are intelligent, which are beautiful, which are real, which contradict what passes for women’s happiness today, which is so wrong.
“This coming year is the year, because in the US we’re going to have a huge amount of attention to the question of birth control and women’s freedom.
“So this is my year. I’m praying so hard that God will make it happen.”
