The Church’s “Best Kept Secret” Might Be the Answer to Global Crises

Sister Helen Alford, OP on Catholic social teaching, human dignity, and why systems alone can’t fix the world.

As global crises multiply—political, economic, cultural—there is a growing sense that the dominant ways of thinking about the world are no longer adequate to solve the problems they helped create.

Sister Helen Alford, president of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, argues that the issue is not just external instability, but a deeper intellectual failure: the frameworks guiding today’s decision-makers are increasingly disconnected from the realities they are meant to address.

In this conversation, she reflects on her formation as an engineer, her path into the Dominican order, and her work at the Vatican engaging global experts across disciplines. At the center is a neglected resource: Catholic social teaching—often called the Church’s “best kept secret”—and its potential to reframe how we think about human dignity, systems, and responsibility.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why today’s dominant intellectual frameworks may be incapable of solving modern crises

• The principle of subsidiarity and how it restores agency in a system-driven world

• Why Catholic social teaching remains largely unknown—even within the Church

• The relationship between prayer and action in times of global instability

• Whether a new “way of thinking” is needed to address the scale and complexity of today’s problems

This is a conversation about intellectual crisis, human dignity, and whether the Church’s vision can still offer a coherent path forward in a fractured world.

Transcript

Intro: Sister Helen Alford is a Cambridge-trained engineer who has spent her life making the Catholic Church's social teaching relevant in the modern world. Appointed President of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences by Pope Francis in 2023, she works with top Catholic and non-Catholic thinkers across diverse fields like economics, law, and health care to address the most urgent challenges facing society. In this role, she works closely with the pope to shape the Academy’s priorities and serves as a key reference point for understanding how the Church responds to global issues. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we discuss her recent meeting with Pope Leo, the core principles of Catholic social teaching, and the crises shaping our world. And we ask, in a world facing crisis after crisis, does the Church's voice still matter? As Pope Leo XIV writes in his book, the Church's voice still matters. Pope Leo XIV, who was a Catholic in the early 20th century, still matters. As Pope Pope Leo XIV writes in his April 2026 message to the Academy: “Your work will contribute to the building of a global culture of reconciliation and peace—a peace that is not merely the fragile absence of conflict, but the fruit of justice, born of authority placed humbly at the service of every human being and the entire human family.”

Robert Duncan: Sister Helen Alford, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service. I’m really excited to talk to you.

Sister Alford: Thank you. So good to be here, Robert. Thanks.

Robert Duncan: The Angelicum produced this remarkable series of videos on universal human fraternity. Right. And the trailer has been seen almost a million times in, I think it might be four months. And one word that you, in the trailer that I watched, that you repeat over and over again is crisis, crisis. And that certainly seems to characterize our age. If you go on social media, there’s one crisis after the next. I remember growing up and hearing that, well, you know, that’s just on the news. If you get out in the real world, it’s not so bad.

Sister Alford: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: And some people do say that social media amplifies crisis. How do you see the state of our world today? And to what extent are we genuinely in a state of unending crisis?

Sister Alford: Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s difficult to answer it properly. I think the first thing I’d say is that I started to talk not that long ago with a quote about crisis. And I said, it sounds like it’s talking about today, but that was written a hundred years ago. And I think the main thing I would say is that Pope Francis used to say, we’re not in an era of change, we’re in a change of era. And I think there is something very profound happening. You know, we can look back over history and see the Roman Empire, and then that collapses and we have this long phase of history, which some people call the Dark Ages, and other people call the construction of Europe. And then we get this new kind of phase in the beginning of the second millennium. And then we get sort of a crisis around 1500s, 1600s, big wars and that, and we start to get modernity emerging. So we’ve had now about 250 years of modernity. So I think we, you know, all phases sort of have their strengths and weaknesses. In a way, we could say from an intellectual point of view, and I’m in a university, so I’m thinking about that a lot. The way we think in a particular phase of history is connected with the kind of problems we have to face. We tend to emphasize certain things and not other things. And maybe one way of looking at the crisis that we’re in now is that the big way of thinking about the world that we have, which we’ve inherited from modernity, okay, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, it’s a little bit ambiguous, modernity, but we would recognize that there have been some good things that have happened. And in the end, modernity is the child of a Christian era and in a Christian part of the world. So there’s some connection between modernity and Christianity. We might say that the questions that modernity was set up to answer are no longer the big questions. We have different questions. And if we carry on trying to answer them in the same way, we’re not going to be able to do it. And this may also be part of the reason why we see more and more polarization in society, that the people, the big educational institutions, the people who are producing the big ideas and that, they have a way of thinking which can’t answer the questions that many other people feel. And they feel alienated by it and they want to find solutions elsewhere. And it’s not the only element. It’s a big question is what you asked me, but I think it’s the element that maybe I’m thinking the most about now. So I mentioned that and I’ll say it to you.

Robert Duncan: Some people may be listening to you and may be far from the Church or don’t know much about Catholicism, spiritually seeking, and they see what they’ll call a nun, which is maybe not the right word.

Sister Alford: Well, it’s okay.

Robert Duncan: It’s okay. And say, “What is a nun doing talking about the major crises in the world?” So can you tell me just a little bit about where you come from? (That) you’re an economist and how you came to be working, let’s say, on the Pope’s commission for social problems?

Sister Alford: Okay. Yeah. Good question. Well, again, you know, you have to select. And of course, as somebody said to me recently, really autobiography is fiction. But anyway, I will tell you things that are true, but of course I’m selecting things. So I think the best way to start is with my parents because I had very interesting family background. My mother comes from Catholic family, Irish family, that immigrated to London. Well her two parents, they met in London. They immigrated at a time when you would find in the shop windows, if they’re advertising for sales assistance, they’d write underneath “Irish need not apply.” So it was that kind of situation. Anyway. So she comes from that. So a rather poor family in North London, but absolutely super Catholic. I mean, I would say for my mother, being a Catholic was like breathing. I mean, it was that level, you know, and I feel like I got a lot from it. She was really devotional. She taught me a lot of things about saints and all this sort of thing. My dad became a Catholic when he was 25 years old. At that time, he had a PhD in chemistry. He had been interested in the Anglican church when he was a kid and wanted to become an Anglican priest, but his dad who was very high up in the Freemasons said no. So anyway, later on he goes to work for what was a very big chemicals company in the UK at the time, which was called ICI in Scotland of all places, which for Catholics, we don’t think of Scotland as a place where there’s lots of Catholics. Anyway, he’s in Scotland in a place called Grangemouth. He’s working in the dye stuff division. They’re doing all kinds of experiments. And he has this lab technician who he was talking to the lab technicians, Catholic, and he was interested in religion, you know, my dad. So he says to the lab, the lab technician says to him, why don’t you come to a mission we’re going to have in our church? So he said, okay. So he said, I’ll never forget. It was a Sunday afternoon. It was four o’clock. I walked into the church. It was starting with, exposition and benediction, which he’d never seen before. He said, I walked into that church. He said, all I can say, it was like love at first sight. I just knew I was meant to be here, you know? And then he said to me, it’s quite interesting, you know, to be honest at that point, it wasn’t really the Eucharist that affected me. It was the faith of the people. I just saw these people, obviously were completely involved in this. And it just struck me, you know? And so he started reading lots of things and went to see a priest and after a bit, the priest said, “Oh, you know all this stuff already,” because he’d been reading so much, you know? And so he becomes a Catholic. He tries to become a priest. He had a lot of nervous breakdowns, so it didn’t work out. But the nervous breakdowns had started before he became Catholic, but they didn’t stop afterwards. So anyway, he ends up meeting my mum on a pilgrimage to Rome. And so they get married a bit later. And so I think for them, their marriage was pretty tough because he was very intellectual and she wasn’t at all. The thing that held them together was their faith. But for me as a kid, I felt was amazing because I had on the one side, this person who was so absolutely grounded. And this other person who, especially when I was a teenager, I could go and say, “Why do we believe this? And why do we believe that?” And he would have big discussions with me. And it really helped me develop a way of thinking about faith. And he was a chemist. He was a scientist. And then he went on, did a master’s degree in philosophy of science. And so he was talking about all the ways in which the Church understands science, which I thought was fantastic. I just listened to him talking to me, you know? So I had these two inputs, which I think have been, they kind of set me up for life really. So I always felt the Church had something interesting to say about intellectual life, you know? So when I went to university, I didn’t think I was going to have a problem with my faith and then I went to Cambridge and I studied engineering. And then I had an experience, which I sometimes tell people was my Damascus road experience, which wasn’t really anything to do directly with religion because it was reading an article. I had to read an article to write an essay and the title of it was “Engineers and the Work People Do.” The first line of the article was, “What I’m going to describe to you in this article, you’ll find really normal, but I hope by the end of it, I’ve convinced you it’s really strange.” Now this article was written by one of the top professors of engineering. At that time, you only had one professor in a faculty in UK. You had one professor at the top and everybody else was a lecturer. So if you were a professor, you were a really important person. So this guy was a professor of engineering in Manchester, you know, it was one of the top places. So he’d written this article. So he starts off describing a production line, which as he expects, all people who know something about production lines thought this was normal, you know. It’s 1980s, so there are a few people doing things in this production line. They’re making lamp bulbs. So one of these is a woman who’s picking up every three and a half seconds, a little piece of wire and putting it into the coil of the lamp bulb. A bit later, that piece of wire is going to be vaporized, make a coating for the coil. Now he says, look, people need jobs. We’ll talk about that later. Let’s just think about the type of job we’re asking her to do. He says, maybe we should automate it. He says, you could give this as a job to students. So he talks about what the students would do. He says, then at a certain point, a more intelligent or more thoughtful student might say, wait a minute, it’s great fun designing a machine, but it’s really expensive. We should buy a robot and program the robot to do this, because they’ve already been mass produced at that time. So he says, now there, that’s interesting, engineer, because he’s not just thinking about technical problem, but also economic problem, a bigger problem. He says, but still, if you’re a good engineer, you’d think this machine is really advanced. We should try to redesign things around the machine and use it better. And you can maybe see where it’s going, this argument. He then says, but nobody thinks about doing that when the woman’s doing the job. And then he had this line, if engineers could think about human beings as if they were robots, they’d give them more human work to do. And I just thought, I’ve been doing everything wrong. Everything’s upside down. It’s all the wrong way round. We designed the machines and put the people around the machines. We should be putting the machines around the people.

That’s what we should be doing. So I just got on a train, went up to Manchester and said, please, can I work with you? This had such a big impact on me, this article. And he was retiring. He said, look, I can’t take on any more students because I’m retiring, but there’s this project, there’s that project, there’s the other project. Why don’t you stay where you are and do a PhD there? Because whoever gave you my article to read is interested in this and you can get into this project. So he gave me some outlines. So then I go back, I start working on it. My dad, who as I told you, became a Catholic when he was 25. When I tell him about my project, he says, you should read Rerum Novarum. I didn’t know anything about Rerum Novarum. I’m a true born Catholic child, never been taught anything about this. So he knew about it because he’d read it as a young person. So he gave me his little copy of it and I read it and I thought, it’s a bit old fashioned, but there’s some interesting things here. So I started reading some other things and then I read Pope John Paul’s Laborum Exercens. And when I read that, I thought, I can use this in my thesis. So I went back to my professor. I said, I’ve got to write a chapter about this. I’ve got to do this. She didn’t say anything to me about it, but it was really interesting that basically she and everybody else, and this is a faculty of engineering in Cambridge University. As soon as I decided I was going to do that, everybody stopped talking to me about my project. I just had to do it all on my own. It was embarrassing for them to talk about religion in a thesis on technology. But I thought I have to do it, not because I’m a Catholic, because this is the best ideas I can find about this. That’s why I wanted to do it. And they could see that and they couldn’t say no, basically. And so anyway, what happens, I can’t talk about my project with them. And as you know, you don’t grow if you can’t discuss things with other people. You have to have a community around you talking about things. So there was one religious community in that town, the Dominicans. So I started going to the Dominican house and there I could talk about my project. I could talk about Catholic social teaching and they were giving really interesting talks as well. And so, looking back now, this is where it’s a bit of fiction, I’m making the story up, but it’s, I can see that one door closed and another door opened, basically. And I realized, look, I could go this way. Of course, when you join a religious order, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to be willing to let them send you and do something completely different. So I thought still, I thought by this stage, the Dominican is really the place where I should be. I felt that God was really calling me to do that. So it ended up then with me being sent to this Faculty of Social Science, where I am now, which is all about connecting social teaching and ethics and all this sort of huge body of thought in the human humanities with all these modern technical subjects, economics, sociology, psychology, international relations, all this stuff. And so my preparation doing that thesis on how can we get engineering to be more focused on putting the human person at the center was a perfect preparation. I had to learn a lot more things when I got here, but it’s all about connecting what this deep thought has to offer out in the world.

Robert Duncan: Some people listening may think, well, the Church teaches about Jesus and heaven and hell, and may not be aware of the body of Catholic Social Teaching. So could you explain what those documents are in general, that the Church also has competence in these areas?

Sister Alford: Sure, sure, sure. Well, I think you could see this thinking going back right to, you know, even before Christ, if you look at the Old Testament, there’s lots of discussions about how you should take care of the widow and the orphan should be cared. You know, God’s saying this to the people of Israel. Then of course, in the life of Christ, he is very concerned about, you know, the most excluded people, the people who are disliked, the people who have leprosy, the people who are excluded. Then, you know, the early Church develops hospitals, develops this idea of hospitality for people on the road, you know, the Benedictine monasteries. So you can go right back to early, even before Christ, you know, in the whole sort of Judeo-Christian tradition, you can see this interest in people having problems in the world, you know, and it’s connected with the revelation. It’s about living according to the life God wants for us. It’s not disconnected, but it has its own importance, you know, independent of praying, you know, don’t just pray and then hope somebody else is going to do it. You’re called to do it too. So in the modern period, where we had a real break in terms of the way the social order worked, you know, starting in UK, we had this total change in the basis of the economy. It shifted from being based on agriculture to being based on use of technology. And then in the political sphere, we got a complete move from the way most cultures had worked before, where you had some kind of king or emperor moving to a democracy, which in Europe happened in a very violent way through the French Revolution, of course, is different in the United States. So we have this really kind of abrupt change that takes place. So the Church, like the wider society, starts developing a special thinking about this. You know, sociology only comes to existence in the 19th century. It didn’t exist before that because people didn’t need to think about social problems, like they suddenly had to start thinking about them. Same with psychology, same with anthropology. Economics is a little bit earlier, but it’s still pretty modern. The only one of the modern social sciences that’s older is law. Law is the only more ancient one. All the others are born in the modern period. And so the church too is trying to think about how do we be church? How do we carry forward the gospel in this completely different situation? What are the injustices we have to face now? What are the problems that human beings are facing? And that starts this body of thinking, which in an official way gets launched with Rerum Novarum, that document we were talking about in 1891. Although there’s a lot of people thinking before and they help the Pope generate the thinking that goes into that document. Then after Pope Leo, we start getting a whole series of other documents that are produced. One during the Depression, which is called Quadragesimo Anno, because it’s exactly 40 years after Rerum Novarum. And that’s looking at the terrible crisis that people are in during the Depression. You’ve got the rise of fascism. You’ve got the beginnings of Nazism. You’ve got Soviet communism. I mean, all around, you’ve got that crisis that we were talking about at the beginning. And the Popes are saying something to the Christian people at that time, making a proposal about how to deal with it. Then we get later on, after Second World War, we get a very important cyclical on development called Populorum Progressio, that’s Pope Paul VI, trying to use the modern thinking about how should we as a church support all the initiatives that are going forward on human development? How are we part of it? How are we maybe challenging some of the thinking too? And how should we work with people of goodwill who are trying to do the same thing that we think is important too? So there’s all those elements as well.

Robert Duncan: For your average Catholic Christian, reading the Gospels, you mentioned taking care of the widow and the homeless. In that society, that might have been someone that was known by name. And now the problems just seem so much bigger. And it’s very hard, I think, for people of goodwill to know how I can personally participate in the social work of the Church, if I’m not going to sort of give my life and become a missionary, or maybe I contribute financially to a charity I think is important. But it still feels like, you know, detached. Is that a real phenomenon?

“We should try to help people make decisions as close as possible to their own life. It’s a sort of counter to the sense of … being just part of a system where what I do doesn’t really count because it’s the system.”

Sister Alford: I think a lot of people do feel like that. And I think we have to try to help find mechanisms. I mean, one of the ideas in Catholic social teaching is the idea of subsidiarity, that we should try to help people make decisions as close as possible to their own life. It’s a sort of counter to the sense of being not able to do something, you know, being just part of a system where what I do doesn’t really count because it’s the system that’s making everything work. You know, so subsidiarity is the idea that we, yes, we need systems. We’re not saying they’re bad, but that we should create systems in which we try to localize decision making as much as possible so people can really have an impact on what’s going on around them. And in fact, you do see people doing this spontaneously, you know, creating community support, you know, people creating a food bank for people who don’t have food to eat, creating hospitality for people who are in difficulty. So there’s a kind of assistance that people will give. But also, Pope Francis, when he’s doing his social teaching, he was talking about how we should try to bring love into the political system, for instance. Now, that’s a lot more challenging, especially in the kind of polarized political environment that we’re in. And yet, I think we have to try to find ways of doing it. And that’s the sort of thing where we should, I think, create discussions in the parishes or in local communities where we think about what does it mean in our circumstance here to try to love in the context of the political system that we’re in. You know, he says something in Fratelli Tutti about how helping an old person across the road, that’s an act of love. But if you get involved in policymaking where you create a better road system with proper security on it, or you create a bridge that connects people, that’s also an act of love. So that’s kind of interesting. If you start thinking like this, how could we connect our virtue, our love, with things that you do as part of a system, as a politician or as a business person, then I think we open up interesting lines for us to sort of grow as human beings and grow as Christians as well.

Robert Duncan: There is, I think, a narrative that I would imagine you would want to challenge, which would say that the Church before the Second Vatican Council was focused on the vertical dimension. There was a higher emphasis on theology and relationship with God and the sacraments. And following the Council, an increasing emphasis on social problems and maybe more horizontal issues. And despite the fact that Pope Francis said at the beginning of his papacy that the Church cannot become an NGO, some people would criticize him for focusing on political issues and neglecting more vertical issues. That’s a narrative, I think, that’s out there. And I wonder what you have to say about that understanding of the last, say, 100 years of Catholic history and what the right way to look at that would be.

Sister Alford: Well, I think there’s other things we can say which give you a different picture. For instance, before Vatican II, there were these huge lay movements involved in the workplace. And young Christian workers in the 1920s was having meetings of 80,000 young people coming together, you know, at a time when you just didn’t see that sort of thing happening. You had quite important, after the Second World War, the most important political parties in Europe were the Christian Democratic Parties. And three of the founders of European Union, their cause of canonization is going forward. So I think this sort of rhetoric that the Church wasn’t doing anything on the social level before is not realistic. It’s showing that people don’t know enough about the history. It’s true that there was a very active devotional life before. I mean, my mother was one of the people who grew up in that. And that became a little bit more complicated after the Vatican II. But I think that was much more to do with the kind of phase of history. If you look at all the councils in the church, you know, Vatican II isn’t the only council we know. It’s Vatican II because there was Vatican I, and there were councils before that. You tend to find that immediately after a council, there’s a bit of uncertainty about what to do with it. And so some of the things that happened, say in the liturgical reform, people weren’t quite sure what to do with it. They weren’t quite sure how to put devotions together with a real sense of the importance of the Mass, for instance. Because I remember when I was a young kid, you used to go to Mass, and all people would sit there saying their Rosary through the Mass. So in a way, some of the theologians want to say, look, let’s get more involved in the Mass rather than saying our Rosary. What was the side effect of that? It started to downplay a bit the devotions that people had, you know, and that didn’t always work very well. So I think this is a phase of change that we were in. And like all changes, they’re a bit difficult and painful, and we can try to reassess them and bring back some things that we lost and things like that. But this idea that we weren’t doing anything on social justice before the council, and then suddenly it will just change. History doesn’t bear that out, if you know something about the history.

Robert Duncan: Do you think the Church gets the credit it deserves for the social work that it did both before the Council and up through today, from the world?

Sister Alford: I think that is a really good question. I’m glad you asked me that, Robert, because I don’t think so. And I think it’s partly because we’re not very good at telling the story. The Catholic Church is the biggest provider of education in the world today. It’s interesting, we’ve just done an interesting statistical study with some postdocs connected with the Academy. And they found, you’ve got to listen to me carefully on this, they found that where you get more Catholic healthcare institutions, you tend to have a higher mortality rate. Now, not because the Catholic institutions are not doing their job very well, but because they’re going to the places where there are the most difficult health problems. They are focusing their efforts in the places where they are. So, they don’t go to places where it’s so easy. They want to go where there’s really difficulty and they work there. And sometimes they often hand over to other people and then they move on to the more difficult place. So, there’s a lot of data that we could use to show what we’re doing and we don’t show and people don’t know. There is data collected by the Holy See. There’s a feature of statistical office in the Holy See, but we need to do a lot more to get that information out to the world. But it’s there, we can show it. There is a website called Global Catholic Education Org, which has several reports on Catholic education across the world and also development indicators as well, if anybody’s interested to go and look further at it.

Robert Duncan: So you spent time teaching at the Angelicum. How many years did you teach social sciences?

Sister Alford: Yeah, I’ve been there 30 years now.

Robert Duncan: And it was, what, three or four years ago that you were appointed. Can you tell me about that appointment and what that job means?

Sister Alford: Yeah, so I was elected to the Academy in 2020.

Robert Duncan: What is the Academy?

Sister Alford: Okay, the Academy was founded by Pope John Paul II in 1994. There’s a much older academy called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which was originally founded in the early 1600s. Galileo was a part of it. Many famous scientists were. But with all the vicissitudes of history, it now belongs to Italy. It was lost. So the Pope refounded it in 1936. So the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has had this long history. Social Sciences was founded in 1994 by Pope John Paul II, I think because he realized the importance of the whole social outreach of the Church, the social teaching. He wanted a body of experts working in the Holy See to help with the social teaching. But also, if you look at the statutes of the Academy, the first thing we’re supposed to do is to promote the study of the social sciences and promote the progress of the social sciences. So our first goal is one about improving knowledge, trying to come closer to the truth. Then we have a second goal, which is to help the Church develop her social teaching and to apply the social teaching to contemporary problems. So the two things are connected with each other. But the first thing is, get really good knowledge so then we can use it. Because the whole idea behind that is that God is the creator before he’s the revealer or the redeemer. And we should expect, as Christians, to be able to find convergence between what comes out of science and what is coming out of faith. We shouldn’t be worried or concerned about it. We should be looking for this convergence. And so the Church wants to promote knowledge, the best knowledge we can find, to deal with the problems that we face today.

So from the beginning, the academy had three big projects. One was on work, because that’s historically very important for the social teaching. Another one was on democracy, because they could already see that there were going to be some problems about democracy in the future. And the last one was on intergenerational solidarity, which I think is really prophetic. Other people only started talking about intergenerational solidarity much later. And then since then, the academies worked on all kinds of different topics. We can talk about it more. The one that was closest to creating a social encyclical, I think, was when in 2014, the two academies came together. They had a workshop. They produced a nearly 700-page book under the title, Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Planet. And it was because Pope Francis asked them, please bring together the best science you can find on the question of ecology. It’s human ecology as well as natural ecology. Bring them together. So that’s why there was a shared meeting between the two academies. And he used the results then to produce Laudato Si’ in 2015. So I think that’s a good example of how it’s had a big impact on social teaching. But we’re also meeting with a lot of people. We have people come from the UN, from the European Union, from research institutes, from the Islamic world. We have a lot of scholars, also members who are from India, China. The idea is to promote the best kind of understanding we can get about the problems that we face and help to find solutions to those problems.

Robert Duncan: What do you think motivates people who are not Catholic to participate? I suppose coming to the Vatican and doing something because the Pope asked is pretty cool, but...

Sister Alford: Yeah, I don’t think that’s the main... For that kind of person, I don’t think it’s the main motivation. Although, yeah, it doesn’t hurt, sure. No, I think they think there’s something here. I mean, the social teaching is... For people who get to a certain level, they start hearing about it. I think especially Pope Francis was so much present in the public sphere that people have got to know about it much more. They feel like the UN is in a very bad place. Where else do we go to try to form a kind of shared body of thinkers who can help resolve problems? Vatican might be the place to go and do that. I think they have good experience when they come because they see the church is really interested in listening to them. We have something to say, but we want to listen and learn too. So, there’s a real kind of sharing with a common goal of helping humanity face the difficulties it faces.

“Where else do we go to try to form a kind of shared body of thinkers who can help resolve problems? The Vatican might be the place to go and do that.”

Robert Duncan: So, you were elected to the academy, but you’re also now the...

Sister Alford: Yeah, the president. Yeah, since 2023.

Robert Duncan: That’s a papal appointment.

Sister Alford: Yeah, that’s a papal appointment. I always joke with people. The announcement was made, as you know, as a journalist here, that usually the bulletins from the office are published at 12 o’clock. So, it was published at 12 o’clock on April 1st. So, I always joke, was it a joke or was it serious? Anyway, yeah. So, I’m now the president.

Robert Duncan: What is that role? Does that keep you very busy?

Sister Alford: Yeah, it keeps me busy. I now understand much better the concept of sin of omission because you realize all the things you could do and you really have to select what you’re going to do, but there’d be so many more things you could do. Anyway, so, yeah, you have to really kind of set an agenda for the Academy. You have to think about new members because there’s an election process and then it goes to the pope for approval, new candidates. You have to think about, listen to a lot of people coming who want to talk to you, who want to share issues, and then with the academicians, you’re working on topics. So, usually we have meetings. We have about eight meetings a year, something like this, and sometimes they’re in longer-term projects or sometimes they’re one-off meetings. It depends a bit. So, we just a couple of weeks ago had a meeting on measuring well-being because this is a big issue. As you may know, people have been saying for a long time GDP isn’t good enough. We should have a different measure. But it got a new kind of launch, this idea, in September 2024 when they had a big meeting at the UN about the future of the UN, basically, and they produced this document called the pact for the future and one of it was we have to find better measures of well-being. So, that is a big issue that’s being discussed by the UN Statistical Commission at the moment. So, we wanted to do something that would be a part of the discussion, you know, and so we had a meeting. We had some of the members of the high-level expert group that’s piloting the beyond GDP thing at the meeting, but the main point of discussion was a particular kind of measure, which is a really interesting one from the point of view of the Church. You basically got three ways of measuring well-being. You either use a composite index, like there’s one called the Human Development Index, which goes back to 1990. Human Development Index has three elements to it, an element of education. So, it depends. There’s various sub-factors that go into it, but they’re measuring how well education is running. It’s run by country, okay? So, how well education is doing in each country, health is another one, and then income. And so, you put them together and you produce a composite number and then you rank the countries. And the whole idea of the HDI is a competitor to GDP. And in fact, governments do look at it. It’s important to them to know where are we on the HDI compared to where we are on GDP. So, it’s good in that sense, but it loses a lot of information. When you make a composite measure, all the detail gets lost. So, another way of dealing with that is to have a dashboard. And lots of countries have it now. You can have lots of different individual statistics. But the problem with dashboards is what do you do with them? It’s hard to put them all together. How do you weight things? People don’t really know how to use them very well. So, this is third measure, which we were talking about this, which is called multi-dimensional measure. And this started off as a measure of poverty, but it’s now shifting in to be a measure of well-being. And the idea is that you have a number of dimensions. It’s still being discussed how many dimensions you should have, number of dimensions. And you ask people in the country to answer a question about each dimension. And then the idea is that it doesn’t exist yet, but we want to have an app where everybody can see where they are in their country compared to everybody else. What’s the average and where are they? Now, the really interesting thing about that is that you can form a synthesis. You can get overall measures. So, people can use it for policymaking, but also you can see individual people in it. It’s anonymized, of course, but on your own app, you can see where you are. And as one person said in that meeting, that is a kind of measure based on Catholic Social Teaching because it puts the human person at the center. You can see where you are compared to everybody else. And coming back to this sense of people thinking, what could I do? How do I have an impact? You start to give them some data that relates to them. And maybe we could imagine an app where you could have versions of it that’s relating to the local community, not just to people individually. I mean, there’s all sorts of things you could start doing with this. You start to help people, give them agency, and they can start to do things using the help of these measures. So, this is one thing that we’re working on now. Another thing we’ll start in June, a three-year project on pathways to peace. So, we’ll have, for instance, a meeting on religion, conflict and peace. We’ll look at the economic aspects of war and peace and that sort of thing. So, there’s a number of topics that will start on that. We’re going to have a meeting on satellites because satellites have produced a huge amount of data now. And we could use this data much better for human development, looking at where migration is going, looking at climate patterns. You can get really, really detailed data, which, of course, a lot of it’s being used for military purposes right now. But we could do a lot of peaceful use of it, which people maybe are not using enough yet. So, we’ve got a meeting on satellites. We had a big meeting on AI and human development last October. And then right now, the biggest project we have at the moment is a joint project with the Academy of Sciences on climate resilience. Because the idea is mitigation is important. But right now, we need to help people deal with the crises that are already occurring and are going to continue to occur. We can try to keep climate change down as much as possible, but it’s still going to be a factor we’re going to have to deal with. So, people need to learn to be resilient. So, we had a big meeting in Rome in 2024 about that. Now, we’ve organized regional meetings around the world. Because one of the things that’s interesting, the research shows politicians listen much more to the local scientists than they do to some big global scientists who they think doesn’t know anything about what’s going on in their country. So, we want regional meetings where you bring the local scientists and the local decision makers. And the other thing is we’re not working with national governments. We’re only working with mayors of cities and regional because they are often much more able to do things. They’re not so blocked by the political polarization that we have now. So, try to bring together these groups. So, we’ve had a couple of meetings in the US. We’ve had a meeting in Brazil. We’ve had a meeting in Nairobi. There’ll be another one in Dakar for West Africa. There was one in Europe, in Austria, trying to bring Central Europe and Western Europe together. There’s going to be one in Australia, Sydney, mostly oriented towards the Pacific Islands. There could be one in India. There’s going to be one in the Philippines. So, the idea is bring this, get the sort of thing working on local level. And then at the end, we’ll have another global summit at the end, sometime in 2027. So, you know, that’s not all of what we’re doing, but that’s some of the things that we’re doing.

Robert Duncan: So, if I’ve got this right, just last month in the middle of February, you met with Pope Leo. How often does that take place?

Sister Alford: Not very often.

Robert Duncan: Can you tell me anything about that meeting?

Sister Alford: He was mostly listening. I think that’s his definite mode at the moment. The things that he talked about were more kind of concrete things to do with how we could coordinate better in the Holy See, things like that. With regard to the big issues, he wanted to listen to us. And I brought him some books and things. And I said, you know, these are the topics we’re working on. If you want us to change anything, tell us, you know. So, he wanted to hear what we were doing. And then he may come back to us later and say, I’m interested in this. Or if you just modify this a bit or something, I don’t know. He didn’t want to tell us what to do.

Robert Duncan: Is he hard to read? Did you notice whether his eyes lit up or he was particularly interested in any of the things?

Sister Alford: Well, I think he’s very interested in the peace question. And you could tell he was really following when we were talking about that. But I mean, that’s no surprise to anybody. He’s been talking such a lot about peace.

“I think (Pope Leo) is very interested in the peace question. And you could tell he was really following when we were talking about that.”

Robert Duncan: And that was before...

Sister Alford: That was before the current situation in Iran.

Robert Duncan: So, it seems to me that you have a privileged position, more or less, to hear from a lot of different experts. How would you say you and your role see the question of peace? And when the stakes are so high, what can the Church do?

Sister Alford: Well, I think one of the key things we need to do is share the church’s tradition on how to build peace. I mean, we’ve got a wonderful document in Pacem in Terris, which we had commemorative events in the Academy. By the way, all the Academy’s publications are open access. They are all available free on the website. So, there’s a very big publication that came out on the anniversary of Pacem in Terris, which people can look at. So, I think, first of all, the Church is teaching. We really need to know it really well, because what happens is some elements of it get applied given the historical circumstances that people are in. But then situation changes, like this situation, this war that’s currently on at the moment, or wars that are currently on at the moment, they are not exactly the same. The content of them, the contours, as in previous. So, we have to, if we really want to use the richness of the Christian tradition, we have to go back and look at that teaching again, and then try to see how can we use it in these circumstances. We also need to try and find good information. And I think one very good source of information is the Institute for Economics and Peace in Australia, which produces the Global Peace Index, which produces Positive Peace Index. They’ve been working for a long time. There’s also the Nordic agencies, the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, the Swedish one, the name’s gone out of my head. Anyway, so they also, you know, these are people who don’t have anything to gain by selling information or anything like that. And they’re really interested to understand what’s going on. So, these are really good sources of information. So, I think we need to really root ourselves in the teaching. We have to try and use the best information we can get. And then, we have to try to have some kind of judgments about things, knowing that probably they’re going to be provisional judgments, because as you say, not all the information is available. There’s a big discussion right now about what to do about Just War Theory, for instance. You know, a lot of people started saying we should talk about just peace and not just war. I think we see in the Ukrainian situation that we have to find a way of saying people have a legitimate right to defend themselves. The question is, as St. Thomas would say, look, if you’re going to use military means to defend yourself, you have to have a realistic possibility of winning. You know, just throwing your people into a mincing machine with the idea of glory or something, when you don’t have a realistic view of winning, it’s not morally acceptable. Because of course, you’re always trying to limit the death. You’re trying to keep the human person in the center. But on the other hand, freedom is really important. Cultural identity is really important. So, we’re trying to put these things together. So, you need to have a realistic view that you could actually achieve something with this goal with using military means. And then they have to be proportionate. You know, you don’t just drop a nuclear bomb on Russia. That’s not proportionate, you know. So, there’s various ways of thinking about this. So, you know, one way is how to help people to think about it. There might be some judgments that we can make about specific situations. Draw on the teaching and get the best information we can. I mean, one of the things maybe we should do, I’m thinking, talking to you now, is maybe curate a list of the really good sources of information that we could put on the website so people could go there and look at it.

Robert Duncan: I think that would be helpful. That would help the journalists. This may seem like an insensitive question, but at almost every Angelus or general audience, there’s now an appeal. And if you go to Google and you search “Pope news,” or “Pope Leo news,” almost all the news stories are “Pope against war,” “Pope says no more war.” What is that accomplishing? And how should Catholics follow the news and implement that?

Sister Alford: Yeah. Well, I would say some of the time you should go back and actually listen to what the Pope said. You know, he’s not speaking for too long. It’s like 10 minutes or 15 minutes or something, rather than going to the news report. Because as you say, there’s usually an appeal, but there’s also a lot of teaching. There’s prayer. There’s, you know, it’s not only the appeal. What tends to get picked up in the media is the appeal. Yeah. But the appeal is in a context, you know. So I think, again, it’s coming back to this question we were talking about right at the beginning about living our faith. You know, prayer is essential to who we are. I think, given the crisis that we’re in, prayer is becoming more important, not less. We should be trying to deeply root ourselves in a life of prayer. We need God’s grace more than ever now. But alongside that, we are called to work in the world. You know, we’re called to be brothers and sisters to the people who are suffering around us, you know. And so this idea that we should put together in a papal Angelus or something, some reflection on the Gospel, some prayer, and some kind of appeal, telling people, please do something about this. So the Pope is trying to help guide people to a bit on where they should be giving their attention. That seems to me quite a good thing. So the Pope could do it at his level. Bishops could do it at their level. Parish priests could do it at their level. Parents could do it with their kids. You know, the sense of putting these things together and living a sort of full Christian life in that and being open to the world’s problems. I think, you know, that would be my comment to that sort of problem.

Robert Duncan: I think that it’s clear how, you know, the reminders of the appeals are summons to pray, and Catholics believe prayer is effective. But insofar as those are geopolitical appeals, do you believe they work? I mean, the Vatican and the Pope is often called the moral conscience of the West.

Sister Alford: Well, I think, firstly, I would say in answer to that question is, well, did what Jesus did work? Okay, so I won’t answer that question. I’ll let everybody think about it. So I think there’s a sense, there’s just value in just doing it, in just having a witness, in just, you know, even if it’s completely ignored. But I think one of the things you learn if you look at the history of the papacy over the 20th century is that the papacy is actually listened to. I mean, we get some really striking examples of it in history. In the First World War, you had Benedict XV trying to stop the war at the time. He tries in 1916, and he tries again in 1917. In 1917, he produces a document, August the 1st, which has seven points in it. It comes out, August the 1st, 1917. January the 8th or something like that, Wilson produces his 14 points.

There are scholars, political scientists, not all connected with Catholic Church, who are convinced there’s a direct connection between those seven points of Benedict XV and Wilson’s 14 points, even though Wilson didn’t like the Catholic Church. So that’s just one example. You know, you get words and ideas and things picked up from what the popes are saying. You know, Pope John Paul II was a really important figure during the collapse of the Soviet period. He wrote a very important letter to Gorbachev, reminding him about the Helsinki Final Act and talking about human rights. Exactly what the impact was, we don’t know, but it certainly might help. Even if it doesn’t, it’s setting a tone. It’s a voice. It’s present.

Robert Duncan: One of the things the Church is often criticized for is not having enough female voices in leadership and that the male mentality is the one that wants to go to war. Given that you work in social issues and that you are a woman, do you feel that your voice is heard in Rome and in the Catholic Church generally?

Sister Alford: Well, I think there is a big willingness, at least from my personal experience in Rome, to try to get more women in those kinds of positions. I mean, I think often we have this historical problem that women haven’t been in that position, and so the religious orders and the systems that kind of produce those kinds of things are not really producing them because they don’t expect them to go. So we have a bit of a sort of what the people in finance would call a pipeline problem. We need to produce a few more women who can do this sort of thing, but I think you’re kind of pushing against an open door in the Vatican and you don’t want tokenism. You don’t want women just put there just because you want to have a woman. That would also be undermining. So we need to have the women who’ve got the capacity to do these roles. I think obviously there are women who have that kind of, we just have to make sure they get the background. So I think we will see more of it. The fact that the Pope has started to do it will sort of filter down. We already see women judges in the diocese and things like this. So it’s gradually happening, I think, but maybe from the point of view of the media and the visual thing, it’s not enough yet. And I think there is something, it’s not a stupid point, but I think the tendency is hopefully good on this one.

Robert Duncan: In the series of videos I mentioned at the beginning, climate change is mentioned, artificial intelligence. We’ve already talked a bit about war and peace. When you are not in planning meetings with the Pope and doing all the things that you do, teaching classes, what are the issues, the social issues that really keep you up at night or occupy your heart, your passions? What would you spend your time thinking about? And maybe what should we be talking about more in the Church that we’re not?

Sister Alford: A really good question. I mean, I think I want to say something to you that will sound maybe very academic, but I don’t think it is. I think the thing that really worries me is that I feel like the main thinkers in the world today, they are using a way of thinking about the world, which is not able to help us resolve our problems. And that we in the academy, we have to try to help reorient this way of thinking. And because we can’t be experts on everything. I can’t be an expert on all these issues, but we need to be having a sort of shared way of looking at the world so that we can all work together to resolve these problems. If we’re at cross purposes, we’re not able to build on each other’s work. We’re not going to be able to do the sort of thing. You look at what happens in technology. They’re using each other’s work. They can build on each other. In the social sciences, we need to be much more, I think, have a much more realistic view about human beings, rather than say the idea in economics of the homo economicus, which would be a sociopath, as people have talked about, if you really existed, this person. We’ve got these problems in our way of thinking, which block us being able to work properly together. We need a sort of rethinking. And that’s the thing where I feel, when I talked about the sins of omission, that’s the thing where I think we really need to be doing something. I’m not sure that we’re doing enough. We need to do more. And then that would release amongst the goodwill of so many people to resolve the capacity, I think, to work together, because we can’t resolve problems just on our own. We really need what these problems are so complex. They’re so interrelated, and we need people at different levels. We need people on the local level who’ve got a basic idea. That was the idea of this universal fraternity idea. The universal fraternity can work on all different levels. People can start in the family, in the local community, and we can be somehow connected, working towards a shared goal.

And yeah, it gets more complicated when you get to higher levels, global level or whatever, but we can still have this kind of point of contact which links us. That’s one sort of thing we need to do. But I think we need a new kind of Enlightenment, in a way. The Enlightenment was trying to deal with a whole network of problems, and it produced a new way of thinking, which partly built on the old, but partly did new things. We have to do this with modernity. Modernity did a lot of good things, but it’s weak in many ways. And the Church, because it was in a slightly marginal relationship to modernity, in some ways it saw there were good things, but it has a lot of issues with modernity as well. It’s in quite a good place to try to help input ideas into the discussion, try to help us think differently. I’m sorry I might be disappointing people with that answer, but I think that’s where someone like me in the Academy, that’s where I’ve got to be working at that level, hoping that we can help other people do things that are more concrete to resolve those big problems you’re talking about.

Robert Duncan: For people who want to get more involved at home, that are not in the Academy, do you have any advice for them, how they can apply in their own lives the social teaching of the Church?

Sister Alford: Okay. I’d say they could learn more about it, because there’s always this joke that Catholic Social Teaching is the best kept secret in the Catholic Church. I mean, there are some people who know a lot about it, but a lot of people, even if they’ve had very good Christian formation, don’t know anything about it. So alongside that video series that I sent you the thing about, we have another one called Fraternitas, which is all about basic Catholic social teaching. But you can find, I’m sure, other good resources too. So first thing, learn something about this. Then next thing, have discussions. I think families are great places to have a kind of deliberation. Let’s think about this idea. How could we do something about it?

Then maybe the kids talk to each other amongst their friends, or you meet your friends in a coffee bar or something. So in other words, deliberate with each other. I think we’ve kind of lost this art of deliberation. We’re so used to being a bit passive and being told by experts how you should do things. But if we could try to rediscover this, the ideas are important, but then we have to do something with them. Put them into practice. Start to live them. Start to incarnate them. And I think if we try to do it, we can find a way of doing it. We have to try to do it.

Robert Duncan: Sister Helen Alford, thank you for sitting down with us.

Sister Alford: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.