The world’s most famous living nun on fighting the death penalty for over 40 years, “Dead Man Walking,” faith, compassion for killers, regret, fame, Taylor Swift, opera—and Scotch.
pondered being described as a pop culture icon. Then she let out a hoot of laughter. “What does that even mean?” she said in her raspy Southern drawl. “I don’t know what that means!”“Yeah, OK,” Prejean said, in a warily conceding tone. “You know what ‘pop culture icon’ means to nuns? It means you do more work!”and whose New York presentation was delayed by the pandemic. The opera is, for her, a work of art for sure—but it is also another vehicle to spread her message and attract supporters.
Joyce DiDonato as Sister Helen Prejean, left, and Ryan McKinny as Joseph De Rocher in Jake Heggie's 'Dead Man Walking.'“I’ve seen six human beings executed, a punishment which many people support,” she told The Daily Beast a few days later. “It’s a secret ritual, and I’m the witness.
In the opera, the moment of death—the lethal injection—is portrayed graphically and in silence. “All you hear is the machinery of death, so people just hear their own heartbeats,” Prejean said. “Here are the last moments of this man’s life. I think it’s the most powerful minute and a half’s silence. I don’t know much about opera, but I know you don’t often hear silence in an opera.”Each of the six executions Prejean has witnessed has been different, she says.
“These defense lawyers are my heroes. He wasn’t sparing himself, so I joined with him. Then I kept taking people because these prisoners get a thousand signals a day that they are nothing but disposable waste. To get to be there and be able to say, ‘Everybody is worth more than the worst thing they did in their life,’ is so important.”
“One man was so blacked out on drugs he had no memory of raping and strangling and killing an elderly woman in her apartment—yet he did ask for the forgiveness of the victim’s family because he knew he had done something. ‘So this is what dying is like,’ he said. That’s the journey for them. My job, Tim, is to be faithful, to visit them, and let them know they’re loved.”
“Tim, what is faith?” Prejean said. “Religion is so perverted in so many ways. The god in the litmus test image of God is the Holy One and divine, is also, for many, the punisher-in-chief. Some people invoke the wrath of God to justify the wrath they want to invoke. What does faith mean? My faith is my work, and my work is about a fundamental belief that all human beings have dignity.
Has she truly never felt anyone was beyond compassion or help, because the crime, or crimes, they had committed were so egregious? Sister Helen Prejean, left, alongside campaigner Karen Toley, fiancée of Kenny Richey who—when this photograph was taken in January 2006—was on death row in Ohio. He accepted a plea bargain, which led to his release.Her parents—her father Louis Sebastian was a lawyer, her mother Augusta Mae was a nurse—came to accept their daughter’s work and controversial fame. “Oh lord, my poor mother, with her daughter on the evening news with a murderer.
Botched executions, wrongful convictions, and the exorbitant cost of putting people to death have further undermined the pro-death penalty cause, Prejean believes. She is “optimistic” thatRichard Glossip will ultimately be acquitted of the murder he has been on Death Row for . “All I know is seeing the experiences of death in each of the lives of those six people is that it has been a privilege—and I use the word not lightly—to know them, people everybody else thought were monsters. I got to see the goodness in them. They gave me life. And now I am working for Manuel. He has been in his cell, protesting his innocence, for 30 years.
“We killed eight people in eight and a half weeks in Louisiana in the ’80s, but we haven’t had an execution in the last 17 years,” she said, adding the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards,the sentences of all those on the state’s death row before he leaves office in January. “We have a rabidly right-wing attorney general, Joe Landry, who wants to become governor, who if he wins will use his power to line people up and execute them,” said Prejean.
Has she missed marriage, or having sex, or having children? “At one level I have got to say ‘yeah.’ I have thought, what’s it like to be intimate with somebody, to have sex with somebody? In a religious life, desire is sublimated into something else. My love energy is my work. I have exchanged personal love in a good way for, I hope, a love for people, and a desire to end the death penalty. If there is no love in your life it can be lonely, and I’m not lonely.” She laughed.
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