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Choose Life! Awakening to Justice for Humans and for Earth
The journey began from an understanding of the Gospel of Jesus. Dead Man Walking is an account of my spiritual journey. It was first to awaken to the poor who lived right at the backdoor of our mother house in New Orleans in ten major housing projects throughout the city. I had never been to any of them. The awakening came through a talk by another sister, Sr. Marie Augusta Neal, who spoke to us about Jesus and that integral to the good news that Jesus preached to the poor was that there would be poor no longer. For the first time I really got it, that working for social justice wasn’t a luxury or something you did on the side after you did all the other spiritual things. So I lived among the people in the St. Thomas housing projects. Those are the people that people around the world saw left in the Superdome when we had Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Everything unfurled from working with poor people. I saw the other America.

From there I got the invitation to write to a man on death row whose name was Patrick Sonnier. I had never written a letter where the address was “Death Row.” I wrote a letter to this man and he wrote back. And then I visited with him, and two-and-a-half years later I walked with him to the electric chair and watched and told him to look at my face when Louisiana electrocuted him to death. He had said, “Sister, you can’t be there at the end.” And I said, “No, Patrick, no. You’re not going to die alone. Look at my face. I’ll be the face of love for you. I’ll be the face of Christ for you.” He looked at my face and I walked out of that execution chamber that night. It was April 5th, 1984 and it was the middle of the night. The execution is a secret ritual. People are never going to see them. And I threw up! I vomited. I’d never watched a human being killed in front of my eyes before.

That’s when the mission came, with the words, “Who will we send?” from Isaiah. “Send me.” I had been a witness and so I had to tell the story. And so I began. But if you think of two arms of the cross, I was on both arms of the cross because I soon moved over to the murder victims families.

Pat and his brother had killed two teenaged kids. The families were in mourning, their lives were shattered. Their seventeen-year-old son and their eighteen-year-old daughter had been killed. I found my way to the family of the LeBlancs —who are really the heroes of “Dead Man Walking”—the LeBlanc’s whose son David had been killed. And from Lloyd LeBlanc kneeling by his side in this little chapel in St. Martinville, I learned in him the meaning of forgiveness. He said, “People in our culture think forgiveness is weak.” But he said, “Forgiveness really means I’m a kind and loving man. I’m not going to let that hatred and bitterness take over me. They killed my son but they’re not going to kill me and I’m going to do what Jesus said.”

When I told the story in Dead Man Walking, I told stories on both sides because there are two arms on the cross. When we get into these deep life issues, we live in a culture that tries to polarize and say, “Either you’re for the perpetrator or you’re for the victim.” But we have to be for both and it’s the dignity of human life in both. So I work for both, as all of us are called to do. We do not need to give government power to torture and execute people in this country. We can be safe without that. We have prisons. So I spend most of my waking hours getting on airplanes and going around this country and awakening people to the true Gospel call to live lives of mercy and forgiveness rather than vengeance. That’s what I devote my life to.

The second part of my life is I continue to accompany people on death row. I’ve accompanied six human beings to their deaths and told them to look at my face. The last two people that I accompanied to death, I became convinced were innocent people. That’s in the story of the book, “The Death of Innocence,” where I take you through these two stories that are going to be hard because they break your heart. The story of Dobie Williams, an African American man in Louisiana, who was innocent, was railroaded and executed in 1999. The second story is a man, Joseph O’Dell, in Virginia. All of Italy got involved in his case, the Italian Parliament and Pope John Paul.

Through Joseph O’Dell in Virginia, I had a chance to dialogue with Pope John Paul about the death penalty. In all of the social issues, as we grow and evolve and develop as a community, we people of faith need to be people who critique our culture, who’ll stand up and say yes to this, but no to that. No to any forms of violence no matter how much it is legalized by the Supreme Court. So when I had a chance to dialogue with Pope John Paul, it was a time for real honesty. What I could do was put into the lap of Pope John Paul II—a very pastoral man—experiences of fourteen years. I raised questions to the Holy Father. I said, “Holy Father, does the Catholic Church only uphold the dignity of the innocent? When I’m walking with a man to execution and he says to me, ‘Sister, please pray for me that God will hold up my legs.’ He’s shackled hand and foot and they’re going to strap him in a chair or on a gurney and kill him. There is no dignity in this death. What about the dignity of the guilty?”

Pope John Paul intervened and he changed the Catholic catechism. There was dialogue. I was one part of the dialogue. I want to make that clear: I was not the only one. But I have been relentless in the dialogue because of what my eyes have seen and my hands have touched and what I have observed in accompanying people to death. In the catechism of the Catholic Church, ten words were cut which gave as a criteria—which had served for 1700 years—of when the state could execute for grave or grievous crimes. They cut that out of the catechism. So, in other words, no matter how grave or grievous the crime, we as a society have a way to defend ourselves without multiplying the violence and killing the killers.

Then when the pope was in St. Louis in 1999, for the first time then he put the death penalty in with the other life issues saying no to abortion, euthanasia, physician assisted suicide, and no to the death penalty, which he said is cruel and unnecessary. He could acknowledge and see that the death penalty involves cruelty or torture, something our Supreme Court refuses thus far to see. They do not see that the death penalty is the practice of torture. They have even used words in the Furman decision that it is not against the dignity of human beings to execute them, even when we know we have an alternative of a life sentence.

So through these books I tell about my journey. The best thing we can ever do for each other as people of faith is to share with each other: “Let me tell you what happened to me. Let me tell you how the Spirit of God is moving in my life.” And that triggers in us, it sparks in us that very same potential that is in all of us to be people of peace.

I now have extended and deepened my work, not only to work for human rights in the abolition of the death penalty, but also to be able to embrace the spirituality of our planet Earth. If human beings are under the death penalty, our planet is under the death penalty. We used to think our oceans were infinite, the air was infinite, the soil was infinite. We have poisoned the waters, we have poisoned the air and we have exploited them. We have thought of the Earth as a resource, just something to be used for our use, our profit for business. We cut the forests, drain the ocean of the fish. We have to take a whole other approach to Earth so I have begun to work for that, working with young people to understand that the whole seamless garment is all connected. Human beings, yes, they have to help people not live in poverty, have to help people live where justice really demands that everyone has what they need for a dignified life. But then that also extends to Earth.

So I live and work and continue. The spirituality is what feeds me. Airports are my cloister. Airplanes are my cloister. I continue to feed in the community, the Catholic community of faith. That is what keeps me going, because, finally, when you do the work of justice, it’s never the work of a lone individual. I’m very much a part of my sisters, the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Catholic community that works for peace.

 

Conversation with Sr .Helen Prejean

Talbot: Sr. Helen, it is an honor to have you with us.

Prejean: Thank you.

Talbot: Thank you for your authentic message on justice and forgiveness. You said at the beginning of your message that your journey began with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Can you take us back to that, the early beginnings of how your approach to the faith was shaped in such a way that you could write Dead Man Walking?

Prejean: It was that understanding of the Gospel. When you read it very carefully, you begin to realize how radical Jesus was because he was always with those who were marginalized and left aside. When I began to visit death row, people actually thought of people on death row as disposable human waste, not fit to live among us. Following the way of Jesus is always to be on the side of those people who have no power, who have no voice, who are consigned to people’s understanding that they are really less than human and not worthy of us. Once I came to understand that and left my privilege and move into St. Thomas, I began to learn from struggling poor African Americans. Then everything changed and the Gospel came alive for me. It was like “Ah, this is what Jesus was talking about!” I feel the privilege of doing that. It’s just really good to be awake. We can live our whole lives and not be awake. When we awaken we know that it’s God’s grace calling us. Then we have to act out of that new consciousness and awareness that we have.

Talbot: Faith without action is no faith at all.

Prejean: Yes.

Pawlus: You’ve developed that further with your advocacy for the consistent ethic of human life. I wonder if you would talk about that a little bit more so we have a fuller understanding of how that informs your spirituality and also your politics to a certain extent, right?

Prejean: Yes. Well, because when you look at the dignity of human life that means all human life. We especially have to stand where human life is most vulnerable and most besieged. So, of course, the unborn who don’t have a voice, who can’t vote and who can’t speak. We have to protect them. The only way to protect them though is by standing by the women and helping women to choose life. As Archbishop Tutu said recently, people act out of desperation. Most acts that involve the taking of lives of others, through poverty as well, are acts of desperation. It extends, of course, to someone with Alzheimers who can’t say his name, who doesn’t know who he is, or to the elderly. We tend to cast aside our elderly in these homes and these institutions. And then, of course, people on death row are primary targets of this because we say, “Well, they killed! We deserve to kill them. They didn’t respect the human rights of their victim, why should we respect theirs?”

That was what was behind my dialogue with Pope John Paul when I said, “Is it only the dignity of the innocent, because it was written that way in the Catholic catechism? The dignity of innocent life. Well, what about the guilty?” The fact is, as we begin to move down this road of the universal declaration of human rights and embrace it, every human being has the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. That is inherent in human dignity so we have to extend it across the board.

Talbot: Sr. Helen, of course you know—this is a devil’s advocate question—there are many people who would disagree with you on a woman’s right to choose, but that’s another program. I want to ask you about the death penalty experience, as a system that is too flawed to fix. What nouns do you put on it? What words do you use to convince people—the people you’ve described—who believe that it is a system designed as a measure for crime prevention and punishment.

Prejean: It’s just pure politics. It’s a political symbol that we’re going to be tough on crime. You look at our track record of thirty years and you look at the thousand people executed, the states that execute have roughly double the homicide rate of the states that don’t. It’s all of those spurious reasons that politicians use.

I just have to go back to something you said, in the way that you just couched what I said about we have to support woman because women are going to be the ones to make the decisions about life. I’m very careful in the way that I frame that because the Gospel of Jesus is always about persuasion and about support. So, to make abortion illegal is never going to be the answer to it, to make it a criminal act and try to imprison people. It’s all about this community of support so people choose life. And that has to do with poor people, too. These people don’t have a chance. What poverty does? This is what I’ve learned about poverty. It cuts out your choices. You don’t choose where you live, you have to live in this low rent neighborhood. You can’t choose what school you go to. You can’t choose to have health care or not. The more we expand people’s choices about life and help them to live in basic dignity, then we can really talk about justice.

Pawlus: I want to pick up on that. What is your take on New Orleans moving forward? I know you’re from there. What’s the future, the hope? How can we pray for the rebuilding that needs to happen?

Prejean: Let’s pray that as we rebuild, the poor are given an equal opportunity. They’re demolishing all the affordable housing. Rents are going way up so poor people are being pushed from the city. So as we rebuild our city, let’s build it as a city of equality. We’ve got to build the city with our heads up. We’re below sea level, for God’s sake, and we can’t keep destroying our wetlands and not respect Earth as well. But we’re going to rebuild the city. It’s going to be different. It’s going to be smaller.

Talbot: Forgiveness, Sr. Helen. The murder victims families and reconciliation. This is an amazing piece of work.

Prejean: They are really our witnesses.

Talbot: Who are the faces? Who are the people you see?

Prejean: Lloyd LeBlanc who said, “They killed my son. I’m not going to let them kill me because if I let this hatred take over in my heart, they will have killed me, too.” He said, “Forgiveness is strong. Forgiveness is not a weakness, it just means I’ve got so much love in me I’m not going to let this hatred over come me.”

Talbot: And central to the Christian faith.

Prejean: Absolutely.

Pawlus: I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for being with us today. We appreciate it.

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