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.