By Carol Zimmermann

WASHINGTON (CNS) – Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph, shows no signs of slowing down in her long-standing fight to end the death penalty. 

At 83, she is writing her fourth book while directing her advocacy organization, Ministry Against the Death Penalty, in New Orleans.

She spends a fair amount of time on the road as she continues to give talks, especially on college campuses, about the injustices she sees with capital punishment. She also continues to minister to both death-row inmates and murder victims’ families.

She has accompanied six men to their executions.

When asked by Catholic News Service in a Sept. 30 interview where she gets her energy, her responses all revolved around the work she does.

For starters, she said she is energized by those she ministers to on death row – currently a Louisiana inmate in his 60s, Manuel Ortiz. The Salvadoran has been on death row for close to 30 years and continues to claim innocence for the sentence he received for hiring someone to murder his wife. Sister Helen said Ortiz is a prayerful man with a great devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“How does he get up every morning in that cell 30 years now? How does anybody do that?” Sister Helen asked. She said she comes away more enlivened from every visit with him and is also overwhelmed by what he goes through – “knowing you’re innocent, knowing the lies they told about you in trial.”

His case, along with the 690 people currently on death row in this country, remind her “we’ve got our work cut out for us,” she said in her understated way. Her Louisiana drawl almost belies the urgency of the work she sees ahead.

Her passion for both the innocent and the guilty on death row – who all have God-given dignity, she points out – has been her driving force ever since she witnessed her first execution in 1984: the electrocution of Patrick Sonnier, a 34-year-man found guilty of killing two teenagers.

Sister Helen first came to know Sonnier as a pen pal, when she volunteered to write to someone on death row. From that correspondence she later became Sonnier’s spiritual adviser.

She has often referred to her decision to write to someone on death row as a move of “Sneaky Jesus,” saying Jesus sneaks up and draws you into doing something that seems small but in the end becomes life changing.

Because Sonnier wanted Sister Helen to be with him and to pray for him at his execution, Sister Helen agreed. But really, nothing could have prepared her for what she witnessed.

“What I saw set my soul on fire, a fire that burns in me still,” she wrote in her memoir, “River of Fire.”
After leaving the prison, in the middle of the night, she said she threw up in the parking lot. But from that day forward, she knew that she had to do something about what she had seen.

As she put it: “Our faith awakens and we speak.”

“I knew very few people were going to get this opportunity ever to be in (the execution chamber). I’m the witness,” she said, adding that she began to speak with whoever would listen.

At first, she encountered a lot of criticism with people shouting things at her like: “What do you know? What’s your authority? The Catholic Church upholds a right of the state to take life!”

She didn’t back down though.

“You just stay in there because you know what your eyes have seen, you know what your heart has felt you know what the Gospel of Jesus says about loving your enemy and forgiving.”

So she has stayed in there, and continues to do so, for nearly four decades. Starting with parish talks and then moving on to writing “Dead Man Walking” and speaking to St. John Paul II and Pope Francis about death penalty wrongs.

“Have to do it. Can’t not do it,” she said of her personal crusade.

The woman religious who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, entered the convent at 18 and spent years teaching in Catholic schools, has not held back in recounting details of what she has seen in state prisons in prisoners’ final moments.

In 1997, she told St. John Paul that she has walked behind a man on his way to be executed, with legs shackled, hands cuffed to a belt and surrounded by guards who whispered to her: “Please pray as I make this walk that God holds up my legs.”

“Where is the dignity in taking a human being and rendering them completely defenseless and killing them?” she said she asked the pope. “How do we respect the inviolable dignity even of the guilty? Can you help our church? Can you help us?”

And he did help, she said, in a 1999 visit to St. Louis where he described the death penalty as both cruel and unnecessary and said: “Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform.”
His 1995 encyclical, “Evangelium Vitae” (The Gospel of Life”), the pope spoke against the death penalty but he included the caveat that it could be used if absolutely necessary to defend society. Sister Helen said that phrase made her heart drop because she knew those words would be used by anyone who wanted to sentence someone to death.

She likened St. John Paul’s discussion of the death penalty to taking the issue to the net, then Pope Francis pushed it over the net in 2018. That was when he announced the revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to include a description of the death penalty as “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and saying it was inadmissible in all cases.

There’s no doubt Sister Helen was pretty happy that day. But by no means did she just take a break afterward.

She knows there is still plenty of support in the U.S. for capital punishment, even as some states are abolishing it, and that Catholics are not much different from the general public in their death penalty views.

A 2021 poll by Pew Research shows that 60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it. It also showed Catholics falling into that same bracket with 58% of them generally supportive of capital punishment, with 27% strongly favoring it.

When asked how to reach people in the pews, Sister Helen said they need to learn about the death penalty in Catholic schools and parish adult education program.

She says she is hardly alone in her advocacy but part of a broader movement. She likens it to “a pot that begins to boil and these little bubbles start at the bottom and they start rising up. Well, I was one of those little bubbles.”

And even now, the work doesn’t get old for her.

“There’s a great life when you feel you’re fulfilling your purpose,” she said, adding that she is glad to be awake to today’s social injustices even though she said it took 40 years to happen.

“It’s a great grace to be awake and then to be engaged in soul-sized stuff,” she said. “Bring it on.”

(Follow Zimmermann on Twitter: @carolmaczim)

By Dennis Sadowski
WASHINGTON (CNS) – Dioceses and parish volunteers who have embraced the “Walking with Moms in Need” initiative are still in the early stages of assessing its effectiveness.

Statistics – counting the numbers who have been helped – are an inconclusive means of measuring how well the initiative is working. But anecdotes so far give an encouraging picture.

This initiative of the U.S. bishops aims to connect pregnant women and their families with parishes and to a growing network of resources with the help of volunteers.

The rollout of the program was slowed because it was launched March 25, 2020, just as the pandemic began to take hold, but it is underway.

“It’s not an abortion alternative,” Cindy Ketcherside, a coordinator at St. Theresa Parish in Phoenix, observed in an interview with Catholic News Service. She calls the women “abortion vulnerable,” but “what we’ve found are more working moms who already have children.”

Seldom do the women have to be dissuaded from an abortion. By the time “Walking with Moms in Need” is involved, that decision usually has already been made not to have an abortion.

Promoting the initiative is typically as simple as posters on parish bulletin boards and brochures. But those in need, going by anecdotal evidence, come to the program from all directions, and even through private conversations following Mass.

The common thread in the parish-level stories: There’s no such thing as a stereotype of the women who are helped.

Kathleen Wilson, coordinator of Respect Life for the Archdiocese of Detroit, likes to tell the story of the single mother with triplets. Forced to move back in with her mother because of the financial strain, she turned to the initiative for clothing, medical and nutrition needs.

“It shows you that we’re accompanying them even in very challenging circumstances.”

Another was a 17-year-old girl. Wilson praised the parish’s “lack of (harsh) judgment” so it was able to “embrace these young parents. There’s been this continuation of supporting this young life as a parish family.” The key question to ask, she said, is “How do we meet that person where they are?”

Parishes are encouraged to find the skills within their ranks, and Wilson knows of one that including a lactation specialist who was happy to add her expertise.

Megan Morris, director of the Life Center of Santa Ana, California, calls that loving the mother “where she’s at.”

“Our hope is not only saving the unborn baby, but bringing the mother and baby home to Christ and a community of support,” she said.

There are training sessions for volunteers. Each mother is assigned a companion to accompany them on the stressful trek of applying to state agencies who provide nutrition and housing assistance.

Among the worries, “formula is a big one,” Ketcherside said. Other help includes finding access to parenting classes and vouchers for Section 8 subsidized housing.

Sometimes the contact starts with a phone call, said Denise Malone, the Respect Life coordinator at St. Rose Philippine Duchesne Parish in Anthem, Arizona.

“I heard from a grandmother. Her very young daughter had had a baby out of wedlock. So the mom and the baby were living with the grandparents,” Malone told CNS.

And the request was a little different from food, shelter and clothing. “They wanted the mother to financially support the child. They asked for help in finding at-home day care. Money wasn’t an issue. And they wanted the mom to enroll in classes. So that was successful.”

The key to training volunteers: “Active listening is a really, really big thing, and being able to understand the mom and where they’re coming from. You can’t make assumptions.”

Another common element, Malone has found, is “fear. They’re all in a position where they’re fearful they can’t raise the child that they’re pregnant with. It is going to be a heck of a lot better to know that the mother will have their baby and we will protect them.”

“They’re overwhelmed,” Ketcherside agreed. “They don’t know where to go.”

In July, pro-life leaders in Baltimore for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Diocesan Pro-Life Leadership Conference noted that supporting women in choosing life is a top priority for them especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision June 24.
The ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, and returned the abortion issue to the states.

Since Dobbs, interest in “Walking with Moms in Need” seems to have increased somewhat. For example, in the 10 days following the ruling, the Archdiocese of Detroit’s “Walking with Moms in Need” webpage received nearly 1,600 unique page views.

In 2021, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said the initiative “directly confronts the false, yet popular, narrative that the Catholic Church merely condemns abortion, without providing the resources or support women need in raising their children.”

(Editors: More about “Walking with Moms in Need” can be found online at walkingwithmoms.com.)