Sister Helen herself would be the first to admit that it’s an unlikely pairing. “Let me tell you what happened to me,” she said with her husky chuckle. “Opera happened to me. I always thought opera was something where you had to dress up and act hoity-toity and wear fancy jewelry. It wasn’t my shtick.”
But Prejean’s death penalty journey always has taken her to unexpected places, from Louisiana’s Death Row to the Vatican to a best-selling book to an Oscar-nominated Tim Robbins movie. Why not an opera?
It was a raw, emotional experience for Dayton audiences who caught Prejean’s presentation — part of the UD Speaker Series — or the Dayton Opera’s performance last weekend.
I’ve been thinking about the death penalty ever since.
It’s not that I don’t know my own mind about the issue. I have long been a strong opponent, troubled, first and foremost, by the terrifying possibility of an innocent person’s execution.
It’s just that opposition to the death penalty has seemed such a political orphan, with no champions on either side of the aisle. It has seemed like Dead Cause Walking.
Why waste your time, energy and heart on something so unpopular with the American public, so unlikely to change?
Thank God Sister Helen didn’t see it that way.
“She plays a crucial part in keeping the dialogue going,” said Dayton defense attorney Dennis Lieberman, who has represented 25 death penalty clients. “The more we talk about it, the more likely it is that we will end it.”
True, she hasn’t ended the death penalty in America, but she already has affected worldwide change. In 1997, she wrote an impassioned letter to Pope John Paul II, describing her 14 years of accompanying prisoners to the death chamber. “Surely, Holy Father,” she wrote, “it is not the will of Christ for us to ever sanction governments to torture and kill in such a fashion, even those guilty of terrible crimes.”
The Pope listened. Later that year, he changed the church catechism on the death penalty for the first time in 1,600 years, making the church’s opposition unqualified. Since then, I have seen many Catholics turn into capital punishment opponents.
Yes, one five-foot firecracker of a nun can bring about that kind of change in the world.
“When you humanize people in the judicial system, we look at them differently than if we treat them like a number or someone with a mask on,” Lieberman explained. “And I think public sentiment is starting to change. More and more people are thinking about whether the death penalty is something that a civilized people should do.”
It was an accidental ministry for Sister Helen that began with the simple task of becoming a pen pal to Death Row inmate Patrick Sonnier at Angola.
“Sneaky Jesus,” she quipped, had something more profound in mind. Since 1984, she has divided her time between educating the public about the death penalty and counseling Death Row prisoners.
Prejean learned a very important lesson in the process of writing her book, “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States.”
It’s critical, she said, to acknowledge –and to honor – the victims and their families.
“My job is bringing people to both sides of the suffering and saying, ‘It’s about us,’” she said.
In the opera, she noted that both families were “singing the same pain.”
The opera by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally opens with a devastating depiction of the murder of two teenage lovers having a carefree tryst in the woods. From the first moment, the audience is forced to confront the heinous nature of the crime, and it never turns away from the pain of the young victims’ families.
Both families, Prejean told her UD audience, are “singing from the same pain.” She added, “I have met people who have committed unspeakable crimes, but I’ve never met a person without a story. It’s not that you condone it (the crime), but every human being is worth more than the worst thing they’ve done.”
And then, of course, there are the innocent.
During the question-and-answer session after her UD talk, Prejean introduced a man in a baseball cap who stepped up to the podium. “This is Derrick Jamison,” she said, “America’s 119th Death Row exoneree.”
In 2005, all charges were dismissed against Jamison in the killing of a Cincinnati bartender. He spent 20 years on Death Row.
Yet his manner is genial, easygoing. He sticks around after the lecture and patiently answers the questions of college kids. “Sister Helen is my best friend,” he said with a smile.
The death penalty ignores the possibility of innocence — or redemption. “Be people of peace,” she urged. “God is always going to be on the side of compassion.”
And “sneaky Jesus,” she said, doesn’t merely want us to examine our hearts,“He wants us to be a force for justice. He wants us to roll up our sleeves.”
He wants us to shake off our helplessness, our sense of futility. “Without the voice of the people, nothing will change,” Prejean said. “This is being done in our name.”
To contact this columnist, write to maryjomccarty@gmail.com.
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