Life on the Row

Alex Coolman

It’s a frightening thing to take the Christian faith seriously, says

Sister Helen Prejean, an anti-death penalty activist and the author of

the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Dead Man Walking.”

It’s frightening because the Christian gospels, in her view, contain a

very radical message about the need to reach out, as Jesus did, to the

most marginalized members of society.

Think seriously about what the Bible means, she’s found, and you end up

actually getting involved with these marginal figures, the outcasts,

pariahs and criminals who are rejected by almost everyone.

It becomes impossible, she’s found, simply to say to them, “I’m going to

pray for you.”

Instead, it becomes necessary to take action.

Prejean, who will speak at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Our Lady Queen of Angels

in Newport Beach, has done just that, serving as spiritual counselor to a

number of inmates on Death Row in the prisons of Louisiana and working

restlessly to oppose capital punishment. It was her work with condemned

murderers described in “Dead Man Walking,” spiritually preparing them to

die while working with courts and politicians to try to keep them alive,

that inspired the Academy Award-winning Tim Robbins film of the same

name.

But the 59-year-old nun from Louisiana said it took her a long time to

come to her current -- and fairly political -- understanding of the

nature of her faith.

For years, Prejean said, she felt that core of the spiritual life was

“praying and being close to God.”

“It had much more in it than the impetus that there was going to be life

in the hereafter, and as long as you were kind and charitable, that was

all that mattered,” she said.

To the extent that she was aware of social injustice, Prejean did not

find its existence troubling. It seemed to her that the suffering of the

poor was inevitable and that redemption would come in the next world. The

main thing, she thought, was to cultivate “a personal relationship with

God” in order to be ready for the afterlife.

“I used to say things like, ‘If the poor have God, they have everything,’

” she said.

Prejean’s views changed abruptly in 1981 when she began to work in the

St. Thomas housing projects, a poor black community in New Orleans.

There, where half the adult population had not completed high school and

a third of all babies were born to unwed mothers, she came to a new

understanding of the obligations of her faith.

“The experience of being among the people and living with other religious

women put me on a whole new trajectory,” Prejean said. “It was witnessing

their suffering that galvanized me because you can’t see people suffering

and just remain neutral and say I’m going to walk away.”

This gut feeling -- that the face-to-face confrontation with humans in

trouble demands a concrete and compassionate response -- is something

that Prejean has found impossible to ignore. But she has been surprised

in her dealings with the criminal justice system by how easily many

people -- especially people who profess a strong sense of faith -- are

able to construct a sort of emotional wall between their actions and

their spiritual beliefs.

In “Dead Man Walking,” Prejean describes her consternation at the views

of C. Paul Phelps, who was the head of Louisiana’s Department of

Corrections in the ‘80s.

Phelps, whom Prejean describes as a “good Catholic man,” felt the death

penalty accomplished nothing and was unfairly applied, Prejean said. But

he believed that he personally was merely the servant of the system and

was consequently obliged to make sure that executions proceeded as

smoothly as possible.

Prejean describes the current head of Louisiana correction, Burl Cain, as

a man torn by similar conflicts.

“He’s a born-again Christian, and he prays with the guys on the gurney

and even tries to have a meal of fellowship with them,” she said.

“He’s trying so hard to be a good guy. And yet he nods his head to the

executioner and kills him.”

That a deep sense of the Christianity can coexist with this sort of

acquiescence to the political status quo seems troubling to Prejean. In

fact, citing thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Albert

Camus, she argues that a person who would live ethically has an

obligation to resist cruelty whenever he or she encounters it.

“Once I got into this, I realized how radical and life-changing it was

and how it turns everything on its head,” Prejean said.

Even if many Christians feel comfortable supporting the status quo and

donating a few dollars to their church, Prejean believes the core of

their faith is a powerful, perhaps even revolutionary, vision of social

justice.

“My image is that what has happened is that Christianity has become very

domesticized,” Prejean said. “They’ve made him into a little poodle with

a rhinestone necklace. But Jesus is like a lion untamed. If you try to

ride him, you get flipped.”