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Chicago Catholic editor authors first-ever biography of Helen Prejean

By Joyce Duriga | Editor
Thursday, October 26, 2017

The following are excerpts from “Helen Prejean: Death Row’s Nun,” written by Chicago Catholic editor Joyce Duriga and released in September by Liturgical Press ($14.95) as part of its People of God series. Prejean is author of the best-selling book “Dead Man Walking,” which was adapted as a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, as well as a play and an opera. 

Sister Helen Prejean is a diminutive woman and a force of nature. She’s quick to laugh and quick to crack a joke. Her Southern drawl charms the audiences of this gifted storyteller — her voice lowers as she tells a serious or grim part of a story and rises at funny or exciting parts. She doesn’t wear a habit; she keeps her hair short and dark, wears glasses, and has a cross around her neck and a simple, gold band on her left-hand ring finger. 

Now in her 70s, Sister Helen, a Sister of St. Joseph, continues to crisscross the country, speaking to anyone who will listen — church and school groups, university students, elected officials, and news media, to name a few. She speaks about the need to end capital punishment in the United States. It’s a topic Sister Helen knows a lot about since she has accompanied six people on death row to their executions and in recent years has taken up the cause for those unjustly condemned. …

From her entrance into the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1957 until the early 1980s, Sister Helen served as a teacher, novice master, and religious educator in a parish. 

Reforms of the Second Vatican Council geared toward religious congregations of men and women energized Sister Helen’s community and moved them from a focus on education to a focus on social justice. 

In her book “Dead Man Walking,” Sister Helen wrote of how she was a little reluctant to jump on the social justice bandwagon. Her understanding of faith and religious life was one of a personal relationship with God. Entering into social justice work wasn’t easy or simple, and the answers to the problems weren’t either. 

It took Sister Helen a long while before she grasped the social justice aspect of the Gospel. Part of it was because she was formed in a dualism straight out of the Greeks and Plato. She had learned that the eternal life, the unchanging eternal, is what lasts forever, and that the temporal, ephemeral, secular, transitive really doesn’t last. With that formation, a person sought an eternal union with God. 

Gradually she came to understand that it was a cohesive whole. Theology and the physical sciences existed and grew together. While it is imperative that every soul seeks heaven and the faithful are called to help others seek heaven, everyone is still called to help the poor, whom Jesus said would always be among us. 
It didn’t help that Sister Helen didn’t know any real poor people. “I was living in white privilege and living in an elite class — the educated. My daddy had money and I was separated from poor people. I wasn’t mean or evil-spirited, but I was simply naive and blind to the struggles of poor people,” she says.

Under her understanding, women religious were not social workers and were not meant to get involved in politics, become involved in social justice, or try to change things in the secular sphere. They were called to help everybody to know God. But Sister Helen kept an open mind, and in 1980, at age 40, she “awakened to the Gospel of justice,” she says. That awakening came as her community gathered to decide its ministries for the forthcoming decade.

Sociologist Sister Marie Augusta Neal of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur addressed the community during its gathering in Terre Haute, Indiana, and laid out the injustices going on in the United States and around the world. What were the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille going to do to relieve some of the poor’s burdens, Neal challenged. 

The speaker proceeded to dismantle Sister Helen’s arguments that nuns weren’t social workers and weren’t political. Neal talked about Jesus as the Good News for the poor. Of course God loved the poor, but it was not God’s will for some people to be poor and some people to be rich. 

The theology Sister Helen had studied never talked about resistance to the evils of poverty, or that poverty is not God’s will. She accepted that some people were rich and some people were poor, and if poor people loved God and suffered with Jesus on the cross, one day they would have a higher place in heaven. 

“That’s about as naive as you can get when you’re somebody who is privileged and never had to endure their suffering like lack of health care, your children or your husband dying, or you dying because you don’t have health care,” she says. Neal told the sisters that day that the Good News Jesus brings to the poor is that they would be poor no longer, that they had a right to resist poverty and work for what was rightfully theirs. 

Sister Helen was raised in the Jim Crow days when whites and blacks were segregated. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation in Southern states on both a state and local level. The only African-American people Helen met growing up were house servants. She knew their first names but not their last names. While her mom and dad were kind to the servants, they never questioned the system that subjugated black people as second-class citizens who couldn’t even drink from the same water fountains as whites or sit with them in the movie theater. 

It was something the young Helen had not questioned. “Colored” and “White” signs hung over restroom doors, water fountains, and entrances designating who could use them. Segregation even existed in her home parish where black Catholics sat in a separate part of the church, and their children received the sacraments separately. 

At age 12, Helen witnessed her first physical attack against a black person. She and a friend were on the bus one day in December 1952 heading to do their Christmas shopping. She was in seventh grade. Life was good, and Helen and her friends were joking with each other during the ride. 

When the bus reached their stop, and everyone was getting out, the driver shouted an obscenity to a young black woman and kicked her with his foot, throwing her off the bus. The woman fell to the sidewalk on her hands and knees, her purse flying open and coins spilling out onto the concrete. The young woman didn’t say anything or look at the driver. She just picked herself up and walked away. Helen felt awful and the event stayed with her. 

Memories like those continued to surface the longer Neal spoke during the seminar. The blinders fell from the nun’s eyes, mind, and heart. Sister Helen entered the talk thinking, “I’m spiritual, I’m apolitical. I don’t get involved in all the political stuff. We’re nuns, we’re not politicians.” Neal blew through Helen’s arguments. It was like she was reading Sister Helen’s mind. 

Neal said, “You know, in a democracy, there’s no apolitical stance to take. If you’re not doing anything, then that means you’re supporting the status quo and that is a very political stance to take.” Sister Helen thought, “Dang, she got me — on Jesus and on the apolitical.” Culture puts blinders on people and we say things like, “Well, honey, that’s just the way we do things in the South. It’s just better for the races to be separate,” Sister Helen says. The privileged whites never questioned the rules because they had no experience of the suffering on the other side. 

Something within her shifted during Neal’s talk. Sister Helen likened it to the apostles at Pentecost. It was a real transformation that led her to act. She felt she couldn’t do anything else. After “Dead Man Walking” was released, Sister Helen had the chance to thank Sister Maria Augusta Neal for the talk she gave that converted her heart to the Gospel of social justice. Neal was “a steadfast prophet,” Sister Helen says, and woke her up to the needs of the poor.

Topics:

  • books
  • sister helen prejean

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