For Mary Novak, being the first lay executive director of NETWORK, a social justice lobby of Catholic sisters founded in 1972, is an “integrating role at this stage in my life,” bringing together her experience as a trauma-informed lawyer, educator, chaplain, organizer, activist, and restorative justice practitioner.
Novak began her role at NETWORK in 2021. Since then, she has helped lead the organization through its 50th anniversary and strategic planning process, which ended up expanding NETWORK’s advocacy into climate justice for the first time.
Day to day, Novak’s job as executive director could look like anything from meeting with the White House to fundraising, advocacy and education, speaking with groups across the country, and more.
Being executive director of NETWORK was “not something I imagined,” Novak says. “When my predecessor’s retirement was announced and the job profile for her replacement was released, I started to receive emails from folks all over the country.” Eventually, she got a call from the person leading the job search. Novak said she would talk to them after the 2020 election. “It really mattered to me, taking on this huge role, who was in the presidency,” she says. “Could legislation pass? Could we do our common good work? So I went away on retreat and I really did pray about it.”
Then, through a process of discernment with the board of directors, “I felt a deeper call to my next yes,” she says.
“This is a time for lay leadership in positions like mine in ministries founded by Catholic sisters,” Novak says. As the number of Catholic sisters declines in the United States, “people with spiritual, theological, and professional formation like myself are really critical to leading the ministries they created. I see lay leaders as bridges to the fuller vision of what Vatican II opened up, and what we are still in the nascent stages of living into.”
Prior to the Second Vatican Council, for example, “religious and priests were the holy ones and the rest of us were led by them,” she says. “There was no recognition in our church that all of us are holy.”
Novak hopes more laypeople will feel empowered and that the church will continue to recognize their vocations. “Colleges and universities founded by women’s religious communities are all about understanding life as a call and learning one’s vocation,” Novak says. “But in my generation, that was not how we were raised. There are more young people who will continue to live into these leadership roles.”
Novak sees her vocation as one “centered on love, always discerning where I’m called to serve.” Novak was raised Catholic but left the church at 18. She went to law school and returned to the Catholic tradition when she found a “vibrant, multifaceted Catholic community that really embraced the universal call to holiness that is so central to Vatican II.”
After rejoining a Catholic community, she left her for-profit law practice to study theology. “I was so taken by the Catholic tradition that I had never actually known that I was so drawn to studying it,” she says.
While she was working as a death penalty lawyer who practiced restorative justice a little more than a decade ago, Novak was asked to help start a nonprofit called the Catholic Mobilizing Network, which works to end the death penalty and promote restorative justice. She agreed to help start the organization and serve as their founding board chair.
At Catholic Mobilizing Network, Novak worked with many women religious in the Congregation of St. Joseph (CSJ), and eventually became an associate with the CSJ community. “I’m in this bridge space between laypeople and religious life,” she says.
At NETWORK and in Washington, D.C., Novak says what keeps her grounded and hopeful is “unceasing prayer and contemplation, as well as always updating my social analysis,” she says.
The fifth chapter of Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship) is titled “A Better Kind of Politics.” For Francis, “politics for the common good is a sacred vocation and one of the highest forms of charity,” Novak says. “When I read that chapter right before taking this role, it made me wonder if he had studied the Catholic sisters who founded NETWORK, because what they had been doing for 51 years at that point was exactly what Pope Francis was talking about.”
In this election year, Novak and the folks at NETWORK are focused on election education work, helping people “understand not only what is at stake in this election” and why we need to work to protect our democracy—a “multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, inclusive democracy,” Novak says.
“The Catholic Church has more fully embraced democracy since World War II—that’s not something it did before,” she says. “But the Holocaust was allowed to happen because of authoritarian rule in Germany. So the church said, what is the container of our social life that will hold best our Christian Catholic values? And that is a democracy.”
The United States only started to experiment with being a “truly inclusive democracy in 1965 when we passed the Voting Rights Act,” she says. “NETWORK’s work on democracy comes from the recognition that we are actually a young democracy. To strengthen our democracy, which is quite fragile, we need people to participate.”
That’s why this election is so important, Novak says, and why NETWORK has worked on their nonpartisan Vote Our Future campaign. They’re involved in helping people find where and how they can vote and more. Nuns on the Bus is also embarking on another tour this fall.
Especially this year, Novak says it’s important to keep in mind that “we are in what Pope Francis calls a change of era, not just an era of change. We are in the midst of a paradigmatic shift, not only in the United States, but in the world.”
We are called to assist in that “evolution of human consciousness,” Novak says. “It is generational work—we will not likely see the end of all the goals and visions that we have in our own lifetime,” she says. Yet “not only are we called to this work; it is essential to our lives.”
This article also appears in the November 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 11, pages 45-46). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Courtesy of Mary Novak
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