LIVING the Gospel for Sr Helen Prejean has meant having to witness the horror of six people being executed.
They were all people she has accompanied as a spiritual adviser while they were on death row in United States prisons.
It is something she has done out of a firm conviction that everyone is equal in God’s eyes, and worthy of compassion.
From that conviction and her willingness to stand beside those sentenced to death, guilty or innocent, Sr Prejean has become a high-profile campaigner against the death penalty in the United States.
Her campaign gathered momentum with the publishing of her bestseller book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death
Penalty in the United States, in 1994 and then the Oscar-nominated movie, Dead Man Walking starring Susan Sarandon as Sr Prejean, and Sean Penn.
Sr Prejean, a Sister of St Joseph of Medaille, of Louisiana in the United States, and a friend, Franciscan Sister Marya Grathwohl, of Montana, have been in Australia for the past two weeks for a series of public talks on justice.
In Brisbane, she explained her campaign against the death penalty is something she was drawn into almost by accident. It was not something she had been compelled to pursue.
She became involved initially through correspondence with Patrick Sonnier, a convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to death in Louisiana.
After he asked her to be his spiritual adviser she visited him regularly up to his execution and was there at his death.
It was a life-changing experience that convinced her she had to tell others, so they too would recognise the need to ban the death penalty.
Sr Prejean said the key to releasing the compassion needed for this to happen is ‘bringing people close’.
‘The death penalty is a secret ritual done behind closed doors, often in the middle of the night,’ she said.
‘There’s usually only a few there to see it – 12 or 13 people.
‘When I first saw someone executed on April 5, 1984, that’s the thing that struck me. I came out and I threw up.’
Sr Prejean realised that because executions were conducted away from the public gaze that she had no choice but to tell what she saw and what she knew.
Opinion polls at the time showed that 84 per cent of Americans supported the death penalty, but Sr Prejean believed in the common decency of people and that if people were aware of the facts, they would change their mind.
‘I saw I had to tell the stories. It’s through telling the stories and giving the facts that people get to know. People do change (their minds).
‘Very few people who’ve read Dead Man Walking have put it down and said they’re still in favour of the death penalty.’
Sr Prejean, 65, has witnessed five more executions but her first experience was to have been her last.
‘I wasn’t going to go back again. It was too horrible.’
But a lawyer friend gave her six months to heal before contacting her with two more people on death row in Louisiana.
‘He said, ‘Helen, they don’t have anybody and we want you to be part of our team (as spiritual adviser to the convicted)’.
‘I just saw it as a human need.’
Today she is accompanying two people on death row – Cathy Henderson in Texas and Manuel Ortiz in Louisiana.
‘(Cathy) wrote to me one and a half years ago and said, ‘I have to prepare myself for the worst if they’re going to execute me. I think you can help me to be calmed as I go through death’.’
Sr Prejean says Manuel Ortiz is ‘totally and absolutely innocent’.
‘Some of the recent hearings are beginning to show the prosecutorial misconduct that caused him to get the death sentence.’
Seeking justice for the victims of violent crimes, and their families, is just as crucial for Sr Prejean.
‘I call it the both arms of the cross – Jesus has one arm around the perpetrator É and one arm around the victims.
‘I’m urging Churches to have ministries to the perpetrators and ministries to the victims of violence – have ministries to both.’
Sr Prejean says ‘there are spaces of sorrow that only God can touch’, referring to the sorrow of those who have murdered and of those whose loved ones have been killed.
‘It’s just beyond us. We just have to pray for the grace of God to enter those spaces, because we’re incapable of doing it ourselves.’
In an editorial being sent to diocesan newspapers in the United States about her new book, The Death of Innocents, and her dialogue with Pope John Paul II on the death penalty, Sr Prejean says ‘accompanying six human beings to execution while befriending victims’ families has enabled me to descend into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus’.
Sr Prejean’s and Sr Grathwohl’s talks in Australia include a ‘conversation’ between them on ‘Connecting Justice’, ‘making connections between justice to the disadvantaged and justice to the Earth itself’.
Sr Prejean talked about the death penalty for humans and then Sr Grathwohl, who is a cosmologist and teacher of creation spirituality and environmental ethics, talked about ‘the death penalty for Earth’.
Sr Grathwohl says, ‘Care for the Earth is integral to the radical inclusive compassion of Jesus.’
She draws on the teaching of Passionist Father Thomas Berry who says the divine Spirit permeates the universe from its very beginning and is manifest in all creation.
‘I would say the whole universe, all creation, throbs in the heart of God,’ Sr Grathwohl said.
She said, as humans being part of the dynamic web of life, care of the environment is about our survival.
‘It’s about our souls,’ she said.
