Sister Helen

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That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at odu.com. That's odo.com. For our last episode of the year, we wanted to share one of my favorite conversations, which we recorded back in January of 2021. Are you in New Orleans? Yeah, I am. How is New Orleans today? It's fine from what I can see from my house. New Orleans is New Orleans. It's a great city. We're doing all right. But I got to tell you, Phoebe, my little brother just died yesterday. He got COVID. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, he had a lot of underlying conditions. He was 76. So he just, it's just a terrible disease. And, you know, we're Louisiana. We love people, love being with each other. And, you know, you can just see how people get it because they want to have these gatherings and people, you know, drop their guard and it spreads. And I think that's maybe how he got it anyway. But I'm at peace with it because he would have had such a terrible road if he had made it through. And so I'm glad God took him. You said you've been around death for a long time or at certain moments. Is it any easier for you to mourn someone or accept death now that you've seen it and seen it in such a public way, but also in a private way with your own family? Yeah, well, private, of course, is your flesh and blood, your heart, your soul, you know. And it, mother, father, sister, brother, I used to set the table for five. And now it's me. And it's really, it's kind of in a way too big to get a hold of. There was this little kid in the St. Thomas housing projects that reporter was interviewing him. There had been another shooting in the projects here in New Orleans. And so the interviewer was talking to the kid. He's probably like about eight. And just trying to see how this all was impacting his life. And at one point in the interview, the kid said, I'm too young to understand this. Well, I'm 81 and I'm too young to understand this. This huge mystery is that we all die. And I've seen so many die. There's a part of me, I can go through the whole ritual of it, but to take it in and that I'm going to die. That's what's impossible. Everybody dies but me, you know, that feeling. So it's just a big old mystery. What I'm thrown back on is Louis lives inside me now, my little brother. And then moving over into the public sphere of the six human beings that are accompanied to execution. And what you do, what I do with death is I'm alive. I want to live my life to the full as authentically as I can. I want to live in the reality that death is part of it, but to live because death can just punch you in the stomach and knock the wind out. You know, it just knocks the joy of life, the desire to be stunned in a way. And then it like comes back and you go, it's a new day. And just from being alive as a human being existential way of putting it is the truth is I'm alive. And I want to live and I want to live authentically and I want to live to the full. And that's, that's to me is what it leaves me with is this mandate to live and to live fully, which means to love as fully as I can. And when it comes to loving in the criminal justice system, it means working really hard for justice and for people's voices to be heard. I wonder if you'd mind introducing yourself. Yeah, I'd like to say about time. I would have stopped you, but I like to hear you talk. So I just said, well, we'll get her namely. We'll get her namely. Nothing like drinking from a fire hose. Okay. I'm Sister Helen Prey, Sean. I'm a sister of St. Joseph, a Catholic nun. When Sister Helen Prey, Sean was young, she declared the Chuda, they grew up to be the president or the Pope. Instead, when she was 18, she became a nun. A fellow nun once described her as a hurricane. She's 81. Do you think that you are the most famous nun in America? What does that word famous mean? A lot of people know your name. Yeah, probably. I would say, yeah, if that's what that means. Because I've been out there so much. I guess I got streetcred because I've been in it 30-something years. And I do speaking. I'm not traveling anymore because of COVID, but I'm zooming my bloomin' head off. I mean, because you can still talk and be present to groups. And so I'm doing a lot of that. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Tell me a little bit about your life before you became known a nun. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Daddy believed in traveling as education. So we'd head out of Louisiana for a month, six weeks, all across the United States, Canada, Europe too. And the thing in the family car, maybe you can picture it, kids in a back seat. You're getting a little restless. People start jabbing each other. And there goes Mom in the front seat. In the name of the Father, we begin a rosary. And by the time you go through all the mysteries of the rosary in the life of Christ, you have 150 Hail Marys done. And a whole bunch of our Fathers and another prayer of glory be. And you got some quieter kids. I call it Catholic Prozac. And it was a loving, happy family. Then I joined the Convent right after high school. I had great nuns that taught me. They taught me to use my mind. They had a great sense of humor. They had a great sense of faith. And so I was, that's what I'm going to do. And that's what I did. And have been a nun ever since. And did you know that you wanted to have a religious life, to become a nun? Was that clear to you at an early age? Oh yeah. Because I would belong to a really deeply devout family. And like we'd go to Mass, that whole spiritual dimension, the mystery of God and Jesus and Jesus' life. And then how that's translated into the way you love, how you live always has fascinated me. And then the call after Vatican II happened in the 60s, where for the first time the church leaders gathered to reach out to the modern world and to be part of its suffering. And so then that sparked a lot of debate in our community as nuns. What was our role in the world going to be? How could you stand present to the suffering of people that came out of systemic racism and injustice and just be kind to individuals without tackling the system of injustice that was causing people to suffer? So that was a big wake-up moment for me. And that was in debate in the community and real growth. And when I awakened to that, and I moved into the St. Thomas housing projects and began to serve African-American people who were my servants all while I was growing up in Baton Rouge. It was during the Jim Crow days, which I never questioned, because you get to be part of a culture. Well, honey, this is the way we do things here. My good mom and daddy never questioned the system because culture gives you eyes, gives you ears. This is the way you do things. So I awakened and moved into the St. Thomas housing projects. It was only like a sixteenth of a mile from where I was serving in the suburbs of New Orleans, but it was like another country. All the rules were different the way the police treated people. What happened if your child got sick and you don't have health care and you got to go sit and wait from 11 o'clock at night till 3 in the morning with a sick child before some tired little intern is going to see your child? Everything was different. And so that was a huge moment of awakening. I had never even heard the word white privilege before I went to St. Thomas. I didn't know I had any kind of privilege. My daddy had worked hard. He had come out of poverty, became a lawyer. When you're white and you have the privilege that comes just with never being questioned, because of the color of your skin, it's going to just get you through. You never have somebody follow you in a department store thinking you're going to be trying to shoplift, or I wouldn't be scared when I'd be stopped for speeding, which has happened more than once, by a policeman. I wasn't scared of him. So I awakened to all this, see, and it's there working in the projects, learning about all this stuff that one day I got the invitation to write a man on death row. And I thought that's all I was going to be doing was writing letters. And lo and behold, two years later, I am in that execution chamber and watch him be electrocuted to death by the state of Louisiana for his crime. Terrible crime. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough Podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, comedian and bestselling author Chelsea Hamler gives her tips on independence and aging gracefully. I would argue that 50, now that I am 50 and I understand life more than I did when I was 30 or 40, is that you get so much more wisdom and you get so much more experience that you actually feel like you're beginning again. Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel, comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media podcast network. In 1978, a 28-year-old man named Elmo Patrick Sonier was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a teenage girl and the murder of a teenage boy. His brother, Eddie James Sonier, was ultimately given a life sentence for his role in the murders. Sister Helen Prejon was asked to write Patrick Sonier a letter. Tell me a little bit about when you got that letter saying, would you like to co-... I mean, was it just give this man some comfort? Give him someone to speak to? What was the ask? It was Java Cole and coming down St. Andrews Street with a clipboard and everybody he met that day, he was going to invite him to be part of this project and he bumps into me. He says, hey, Sister Helen, you want to be a pen pal? Somebody on death row? I go, yeah, I could do that. You know, as an English major, I figured I'd write some nice letters, maybe a poem or two. It was just a correspond. What was under it was that I sensed that person was a human being who had been condemned to death and it must be very lonely to sit in that cell. It was just like a human being. I'll write some letters and he wrote back and I wrote and he wrote and then it unfurled. It was integral the way it happened because I never planned on going to visit people on death row or much less being with people who executed. But at one point I realized, well, he didn't have anybody to visit him. He never asked me to come. But I thought of him and I thought, well, I could do an in run sometime and just go to Angelo, two and a half hour drive from New Orleans, go visit him. So I told him that in a letter and in the return mail, it was the Visitor Farms. And in the Visitor Farms, you have different categories of visits. He said, look, I'm a Catholic and you're a nun. Would you be my spiritual advisor? And sorry, fill out the form and lo and behold, two years later when he's executed, the only one who can stay in the death house with him, the only one who can walk with him to his death and be there for him to look at your face is the spiritual advisor. I didn't know it was going to go. I don't know if I'd have had the courage to just say, oh yeah, you write this letter, you know where it's going to lead? Write to that execution chamber. Can you do that? I would have said, no, I can't do that. But it unfurled. You had never seen an execution before. So few people ever will. What is it like to be with someone? It's a rare thing that someone knows the exact minute that they will die. I'm trying to think of other circumstances where someone knows that. So few come to mind. How surreal an experience is it and how surreal an experience was it for you for that first execution? So real, you got the right words, Phoebe. A human being who's alive, not in a hospital, not fading, not dying, alive, talking the way you and I are talking now and looking at his watch. You now have three hours to live, two hours to live, one hour to live. And in the midst of that experience, there might be one of the red phones that goes off in the death house where it comes from a court or it comes from a governor that you are not going to die. In fact, you've gotten a stay of execution and they bring you back to your cell. Then you brought back a week later and you get another stay of execution. Then you brought back another week later and then they kill you. It's actually the experience of torture for a conscious, imaginative human being who has an imagination and anticipates dying. The nightmare that everybody has that I've known of a company that six people execution. The nightmare everybody has is that coming for me, the guards are coming to myself, they're dragging me out. I'm kicking, screaming, going, no, no. And then I wake up and I look around and I'm in my cell. It's a dream, but they are going to be coming for me. Then you watch as others have led. It is the definition of torture. Is an extreme mental or physical assault on someone rendered defenseless? What greater mental assault or suffering could there be than to be told, we're going to kill you in two weeks. We're going to kill you in three hours. When Brandon Bernard was killed recently, one of the federal executions that happened, I was with his lawyer. I was praying he was supposed to be killed at six o'clock. This is at Terre Haute. This is on December 10th, ironically, Human Rights Day. And so I'm praying and stopped everything I'm doing to try to accompany and pray for him spiritually that his passage would be without suffering. And at six 20, I get a text from those lawyers saying it's odd. They haven't come for him. So what's happening? He's prepared to go. He's waiting to go. It gets to be six 20 gets to be seven 20. They're not coming for him. And does it mean that a stay is going to be given by court? What does it mean? You don't know. And then at eight something, the guards come and said time to go and they take him in the killing. Because it's in human hands and human machinations and the way that it's set up. How could it not be torture? An extreme mental assault on a person who's been rendered defenseless. What is it like to think about the execution or to be with someone on death row, speak with them when you know they're guilty? And what is it like when you believe that they're innocent? Is it different for you? Well, here's the bedrock. Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they've ever done. Every human being. So when I'm with the guilty, I'm very conscious of that. And recently the Catholic Church coming to that awareness after a long dialogue. That's the bedrock principle, the inviolable dignity of the human person. Innocent. There the outrage is about our system and about the ignorance because people aren't awake to it. Because people aren't close to it because they don't see what it means for people to be executed. I'm with a man right now. I've been accompanying him on death row. Manuel Ortiz is his name. For 20 years I've been, I take him one at a time. So he's lasted 20 years and they haven't killed him and I've been with him. And he is innocent. And how do I know that? Because I have studied the case. I've seen the case. I know what happens when prosecutors have the power, have the evidence, can hide things. And he gives me a lot of courage. But then I'm an advocate, see, when somebody is innocent, you got to fight for them. Do they need a good lawyer? Do they need to change lawyers? Do they need to get an expert witness? Do they need to get DNA tested? I'm right there by his side, not just simply visiting him. How is it Manuel? I hope you're not having a bad day. But you're by their side and you do whatever it takes for justice to be done and for the truth to come out. And that is just happening right now with this case where we're getting in an expert on DNA to really look at what happened. But then generally people are poor and don't have good attorneys and don't have what they need. And you begin to see it's inevitable that you're going to have innocent people in the system that are going to end up being on death row. No wonder we have a mistake rate as high as we do. Does he think he's going to be executed? He doesn't know. It's a slow death being in prison the way it is. You know, he talks about a death penalty sitting on you like a thousand pound gorilla on your back. It's always this threat of death and knowing how the system can work and people have been executed, you know. So it's always over him. It's always that cloud over him. He's never completely free of it until they would lift the death sentence off of him. And he's really clear that he wants to press for his innocence, that of course he wants death to be lifted, but he wants to work to prove his innocence so that he can be freed. It's unbelievable suffering, Phoebe, that people go through. And you want to know why I'm talking to you now? You want to know why I'm zooming with people because I can't get to them in person now? People are unaware about the issue. I didn't know. When I came out of that execution chamber, I was so traumatized. I threw up. I never watched a human being deliberately step by step put to death. And that's when I realized, you know, the people are never going to see this. I've been a witness to a secret ritual. There's only a few witnesses behind prison walls, all these federal executions. People don't see it. There have been two court cases to try to make executions public and they both have been defeated. And I go, I'm a witness, so I got to tell the story. I wonder for you, you said that you only work with one person at a time. You're only by the side of one person at a time, no matter how long that is. Why did you decide to work that way? I think it's all I can handle. I want to be true to what I do. I don't want to take on people and then neglect them. Because it's very, very intensive to accompany a person who's all alone, has had this huge injustice done to them or in a position where the state is really serious about killing them. How do you offer comfort to someone in a position in the last moments of their life? How that feels like a great burden is not the right word. Responsibility. What can you say to make someone feel better? I am here for you. In fact, with Patrick Sonier, he had said to me, sister, you can't be there then you can't watch this. It's electrocution. It could scar you psychologically to see this. He was really trying to protect me. And I said to him, Pat, I've never done this before, but I know this. You are not going to die without seeing one face in that witness room that loves you and believes in your dignity. And when they do this, you look at me. I will be there for you. I'll be the face of Christ for you. He was Christian. I'll be the face of love for you. And that is what you do. You are present. And they know that you've been down the road with them. And when you say you'll be there with them, you'll be there. And that's what you do. It's presence. It's the most helpless feeling in the world to be present to a human being being killed like that. And not to be able to stop it, not to be able to do something. And so different. I've been with people in the hospital who died. They've fade. You can see life ebbing out of them, but to be fully alive, fully conscious. And then to walk across this room here into this place where they're going to kill you. It's one, you know, the Catholic Church, I played a little part in helping the Catholic Church developed on this issue that we cannot ever give over to states the right to take life. And the selling point, I think, in the letter that I wrote to Pope John Paul II was your holiness. Does the Catholic Church only believe in the dignity of innocent life? I mean, a lot of people who say they're pro-life, but they mean innocent life, but guilty people. They draw a line. And if they're guilty, they don't deserve any kind of dignity. Well, when I'm walking with a man to execution, I was Patrick Sonier, the one I was mentioning to him. And they have him shackled hand and foot. He's surrounded by six guards. He's completely defenseless. And they're going to walk him across this room and kill him. And he turns to me and he says, sister, please pray that God holds up my legs when I make this walk. And I said, your holiness, where is the dignity in killing a man who's been rendered defenseless? Does the Catholic Church only believe in the dignity of innocent life? What about the guilty? And so there's dialogue. I wasn't just the only one doing this, of course. But Pope John Paul laid the foundation, which later Pope Francis built on when he announced in May 2018 that there would be a change in the catechism and on the teaching of the death penalty that under no conditions could a state government ever be given the authority to choose that some of their citizens could die. And it was that inviolable dignity of the person. And so when Pope John Paul, this letter to him happened in 97. He came to St. Louis in 99. He was talking and giving a public address and for the first time voiced even those among us who have done a terrible crime have an inviolable dignity that must not be taken from them. Do you believe in good and evil? That's a tricky question. You feel like the right person to ask. I don't want to answer. I don't know. Let's go ask that nun about good and evil. You know all the stuff written on this. I can tell you this, that when a state tries to kill a human being and the so-called worst of the worst, they are very anxious to get you to believe that is an evil person. And you can never say that about a human being. Because you come to this mystery of the human person. So good and evil things happen. But the cause of them are if you can put it in the person, no, you can't. It's evil when you have a systemic killing of your citizens like this in a very broken system filled with ignorance and bias and prejudice and political ambition. Those acts are evil. That system is wrong. It's morally wrong. So that's, I think, the best I can say about that. We'll be right back. Where exactly do U.S.-China relations stand? The Chinese side came in feeling as if they had figured out how to work both with and against Trump. He was inclined to try to create moments of crisis. And then if they stood up to him, they were almost uniquely capable of making him back down. I'm Preet Bharara. And this week, Evan Osnos of The New Yorker joined me to discuss the Trump-Xi summit, which he reported on from Beijing. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. And what it actually takes to survive and thrive as your own boss. From cash flow to taxes to building multiple income streams, because let's be real, becoming an entrepreneur sounds amazing until you realize you have to figure out all of this yourself. I did, and now I'm giving you the blueprint. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. And she's the author of several books, most famously Dead Man Walking, which was made into a movie, and details her experience getting to know Patrick Sonye. The book came out in 1993 at a time when support for the death penalty was very high. In 1994, 80% of Americans supported it. You must try to put yourself, I would assume, in the shoes or think about the victims, the men that you've been with, the victims' families who are there to witness executions and who want it, who need it. Do you think about them and what they're going through or why they need it? Yeah, that's really important for us to talk about. I didn't know what to do about the victims' families when I took that first man on Death Row, Patrick Sonye, and the killing of two teenage kids, these innocent kids, and I stayed away from them. But I met them at the worst possible time, the most polarized situation. It was the pardon board hearing the last step before Patrick was executed. That's when I met them. And that was a public meeting where when you walk in, you actually sign a book, which side you're going to be on for this person, Patrick Sonye, to live or for him to die. There are only a few names on the life side in that. And that's when I met the families, the parents of both of those young people who had been killed. And it was terrible. In terms of the tension, because there I was speaking, why was I there to speak that Patrick Sonye because of his human rights should not be executed? And they were there, you know, with all their friends and all their neighbors and relatives packed the room to just say, we are asking for the execution. And they have been told, part of this is, they were told by the prosecution. This is the way you honor your dead child. This is how you get justice. They killed your child. We're going to kill them. We need your voices at that meeting and they can kind of get caught up in that. And they're in such trauma and grief and loss. I don't blame them. And then I ran into them while the pardon board was voting. Outside the building, we were both walking and boom, we ran into each other. The girl's parents were furious at me. They didn't say a word. They just avoided my face, walked past. And right behind them were the boys' parents, Lloyd and Eula LeBlanc. Their son, David, had been killed. And the father, Lloyd, walked right up to me. And he said, sister, all this time, you didn't come to see us, sister. You can't believe the pressure we've been under with this death penalty. And I haven't had anybody to talk to. Why didn't you come see us? Oh God, I was so wrong. It was a terrible mistake. But this man, the father of David, he said, sister, I'll pray in this little chapel. Why don't you come pray with me? And I began to do that. And gradually we got to be friends and he trusted me. He said, sister, people think forgiveness is weak. Like, oh, you kill my son like you condone in it. Oh, it's okay. You kill my son. It's okay. He said, weakness. All I knew was that I was going to lose my own life and who I was. God, my wholeness as a person, my kindness, if I let that hatred overtake me. He visited Mrs. Sonia, the mother of the man who had killed the teenage kids. She had people cutting up dead animals and throwing them on her front porch. She couldn't go in the grocery store without people whispering loud enough for her to heal. There she is, the mother of the murderer is what she doing in here. What is she doing in our town? And one day she misses Sonia. Here's someone on the front porch. She opens her blinds to look and it's Mr. LeBlanc. It's Lord LeBlanc. He has a basket of fruit and he gives it to her. And he said, Miss Sonia, I know you're having a tough time in this town. Look, I'm a parent just like you. And as parents, we don't really know what our kids might do. I don't hold you responsible for what your sons did. And here's my phone. If you need anything, you call me. He's the hero of that man walking. How you could go through that kind of suffering and not be broken by it or not so shaped by it. That you become a person who wants that same kind of hurt to be visited on another human being and their life taken. Ever after that, Phoebe, you've got to know, when I took someone on death row, the first thing I always did was reach out to the victims' families and say, I want to introduce myself. I'm the spiritual advisor. And the first thing you say is, I am so sorry about your dead loved one and what happened to them. Maybe they'll reject you. And most of them do. Lord LeBlanc is the only one of the person that I've been with on death row who ever, that I was ever able to be friends with. Most of them or some of them even have lawyers that send me a letter saying, don't you dare approach these people because they put you, you know, in this, on one side or the other. How has this work? You've devoted your life to helping people. You're a nun. But I wonder how your work on death row has changed you. What has that done? What, that path that you've taken, how has that changed you? It's affected my life profoundly that you got one life to live. So spend it on essential stuff and hang out in the company of people. You know, where things are soul sized. You're working on big stuff. Even though it may take years and you may never personally see the success of it. That's one of the spiritual, I think it comes from the Bhagavad Gita. Do your work for the authentic reason of the work itself and not because you seek the fruits of it. You don't seek any extraneous kind of rewards. As I understand it, it means you do what you do because it's the right thing. And it's a moral imperative. It's written in your bones as the Prophet Jeremiah would say, it's burning in my bones and I got to speak out. Do you think it's true that as we get older, we become less judgmental? You know, the more that we've seen, the more mistakes we've made of our own, seen our own faults that maybe we're less sure that we know what's right. I think it's if we get wise as we get older, we're less judgmental. If our own lives are besieged or starved in any way or we never have a chance to reflect deeply on the soul part of us, I think you can go to your death being as judgmental as when you started out. If not more, it depends. If we can achieve some kind of wisdom to understand about life, like on my side to understand my privilege, say, I haven't done any bad things to people. I'm a good nun. Yeah, she's a good nun. I mean, you know, people look up to you or will you pray for me, sister? Like as if my prayers simply because I say them has more effect on the way things go than if they say a prayer. And so when you reflect on these things and you realize it's because I was so cushioned, I was so resourced in every way that I can afford to be a good person and not to be judgmental against people. I mean, that so I'm not sure that as people get older, you necessarily get less judgmental. I think the less secure we are in life and we have a need to put other people down in order to raise ourselves up can be operative in people till they die because they don't have any other experiences to counter it. Sister Helen Prejon once wrote, It's important to take stock to see where I am. The only way I know what I really believe is by keeping watch over what I do. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today and I'm very sorry about your brother. Thank you. Thank you. It was good. Thank you. Thanks, Phoebe. Man while our tease is still on death row. Sister Helen Prejon is still visiting him. She's 86 years old. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zujico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison and Megan Canane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at ThisIsCriminal.com and you can sign up for our newsletter at ThisIsCriminal.com. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal This Is Love and Phoebe reads Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes, behind the scenes photos and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other criminal listeners. Learn more and sign up at Patreon.com. We're on Facebook at ThisIsCriminal and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at YouTube.com. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.