Transcripts For CSPAN2 Helen Prejean River Of Fire 20240713

Welcomed. I am director here at the school. What you may not know but i suspect that you do you are in a quaker school. If you have met a quaker you have met a friend with a fuppercaseletter. We are part of a National Network of 78 friend schools. Where the obama daughters in Chelsea Clinton and the quarterback from the Atlanta Falcons in the chartered philadelphia. Mostar are located in the northeast we are the only one in georgia but the quakers inform each a School Community in those values are complicity, peace Integrity Community equality and stewardship. From the acronym spices. So i will clear up some miss misconceptions they should not be confused with the amish. [laughter] they do believe electricity and technology and cars and also believe in disrupting social conventions with the radical notion that every single individual is there worth. When at the very first quakers founded the elma matter in 1689 putting democracy to work and needed to be educated. This is only for Public Education over 300 years making it accessible but then in 1991 and that that those time schools were largely segregated by demographics and white flight it was found to be a model of diversity spending between 30 and 40 percent we welcome racial and ethnic religious diversity social Economic Diversity Family Structure to create a welcoming school of the Lgbtq Community and every other kind of diversity. Wednesday go to school with others not like them everybody is enriched and better prepared to succeed. When it comes to advocating for social justice not only to the pre k8 gray classes but we teach to the goodness of every child we encourage responsible action and Community Service we help children have their own voice and empower them with the conviction to use the voice for good in the world in october there is some literature in the lobby so tonights conversation is in a partnership with the souths oldest independent book provider which turns 45 years old this november. [applause] and of also just become our neighbor moving to the campus here its wonderful to have them close by our moderator is the executive director of the nonprofit programming arm Whose Mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities working for social justice to encourage the expression of voices. We deeply appreciate the work to hold these important conversations in all that they do. Books are available for purchase in the lobby and online. After our moderated conversation sister will answer a few questions if youd like to ask you are able to do so we ask you please come to the microphone so everyone can hear. The end of the evening we ask everyone form a line to come through and then exit to the left. Our honored guest is sister helen who is known around the world for her tireless work against the Death Penalty instrumental to spark National Dialogue to shape the Catholic Church with vigorous opposition born on april 21st , 1939 in baton rouge she joined the sisters of st. Joseph and after studying in canada she spent the following years Teaching High School as a religious education director in new orleans. In 1982 she moved into the st. Thomas Housing Project to live and work with the poor and then began corresponding with one who was sentenced to death for the murder of two years murdering two teenagers. She was there to witness the execution and in the following months she was a spiritual advisor to another death row inmate who would meet the same fate for crafter witness seeing the execution she realized this lethal ritual would remain unchallenged unless the secrecy was stripped away so she sat down to ride book dead man walking the eyewitness account of the Death Penalty of the United States that hit the shelf it was over 80 percent but the book ignited a National Debate on Capital Punishment and inspired an Academy Awardwinning movie and also embarked on a speaking tour that continues to this day. She works with people of all faiths but her voice has had a special resonance with a fellow catholic over the decades to make personal approaches to john paul the second and pope francis urging them to establish the position that is opposed to Capital Punishment under any circumstance. At her urging it was revised to strengthen the opposition education although it allows for very few exceptions. Not long after, pope francis announced new language at the catechism that says the Death Penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the dignity of the person with no exception. Today although Capital Punishment is still on the books in 30 states, it has fallen out of use in most. Prosecutors injuries turn away from a death sentence but the Death Penalty is increasingly geographical streak. But sister helen divides her time between educating the public, campaigning against the Death Penalty, and counseling death row prisoners and working with death murder victim families. Her second book was published in 2004 in her third book river of fire published in 2019. Please welcome sister helen t9. [applause] there she is. Good evening. Now we can proceed. We will ask a few questions and we want to hear from you we are glad that you survived the torrential downpour. Now your book came into my life when i was a teenager one of the things i want to ask you about the evolution from a young nun to a fully awake and activist really not until you were in your forties. You all will flip when you read some of the stories before vatican ii happened in the Catholic Church because so then you go out to teach and even had their separate bathrooms. But they would say do nuns go to the bathroom . [laughter] it was a different entity. But that was full monumental in the Catholic Church ecumenical where the purpose was not to condemn some heresy of some other religion. That the church to relate to the modern world. Because catholics were not reading the bob the bible like the protestants. It is like two pairs of gloves you had the teaching but everything was in latin. With the vatican did was get back to the gospel until the nuns go back to the reason we were founded in the first place. That was to have a life of prayer, be close to god, go out and pope francis was calling the church today. That is what christianity ought to be. And nobody took that more seriously. We started running and i will tell you that and it changed our lives so what is the spirit of god calling me to do and then we began to blossom but it was a big struggle i went lighter than a mystic if i could you know teresa was levitating in the kitchen. [laughter] and then say not lord not now lord. I could tell you some stories. [laughter] who was kneeling behind me in the chapel and she is meditating trying to descend deeply into prayer and then i hear click with the fingernails click. How are you going to be a mystic when thats going on behind you . [laughter] so i can tell you stories. s the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther king was marching and we have began to see what would happen with people of color. We were always in a White Community but our sisters took desegregation very seriously at the academy. Be welcomed young black women there was whitefly out of our school because the other Catholic Schools only had a few token black people so white parents would take their students out of the academy which is what truly society is with your little bubble of friends is not where you go to learn how to live. But that there was so much white flight we could not sustain. We went down one of the proudest things. So now i wake up with the community as well. But then waking up to social justice was another struggle because you have to solve the real problem you had people starving and economic inequalit inequality. And then the wakeup call came with that big debate in the community of how are we called to live . With social justice. So i struggled. Resistance so if you wake up you can understand but at the time that i did wake up and that allowed me to move in the st. Thomas house although stories that unfold in the book and st. Thomas Housing Project talking to College Students as a jesus is sneaky. [laughter] i know they would have that guys execution in 20 years the sixties and seventies and 1980s i am writing a man. I was an english major. And he wrote back and now hes executed now layer a call from atlanta i heard this man tried to save the life of people on death row thats how he came into my life and then i had a dedicated life. So that was the first question i dont know how or get a do with all of these. [laughter] i what to talk about the nuns having an unfair reputation at least post vatican you are one of the funniest people i have ever met and the book is hilarious i laughed out loud at almost every page and part of it is your deep intimacy with your other self and your pre awakened self. So can you talk about the lessons of humor and joy for your last awakened self. I live in a culture in new orleans. People in the Grocery Store now the tablecloth is another joke. So now sitting around for three hours their stories and jokes. This is part of being a culture. And i have found that deep humor when we do what we are supposed to be doing that could bubble u up. Before you break up with purpose you dont have much humor i was serious before i really found what i was supposed to be doing. And all the people i have me met, from a christian perspective. Because it is overwhelming. Like those over the past several months used in debt before this night was out. There is a place called newhope house you can volunteer their and help families to go see their loved ones on death row and go visit people on death row to make them human beings and Mary Catherine right now took it over and she is there alone. So before you leave tonight i wrote a letter and wrote back and said ive got to admit i was nervous and to have a normal conversation in here are thes categories of people if you murder these people hockey beat treated like the rest of them . And i looked at him and said my god he is a human being and we began to talk. So what this brought me about christian and privilege and protected i had been i used to think it was virtue. [laughter] but then you hear what other people have been through those people on death row were abused terribly as children one day they pumped that violence out on another human being but then we as societies say that we are considered the worst of the worst and not only can we say that but we will help heal the victims families and then we give them the front row seat and so you can watch and i you get to watch them die. Look at that. Look at that. So its all about waking up and that i went to st. Thomas and all the kids are coming into the learning center. When they couldnt read a third grade reader. They know how to read and how to critique and how to write because of a good education so you cant call out your own virtue. And thats what st. Thomas was all the rules were different whether or not you could get a good job just by walking in the room by the color of your skin how people treat you so then when he was strapped into the chair and electrocuted and i was with him then was real clear what my mission was. It was about him they were killing a human being nobody was there with me. Nobody held my hand and its the first time watching one of your clients be killed as well. And the witnessing of that education of that experience he really is in charge of this conversation. [laughter] no way. But the fire comes from the saint bonaventure. Back from the 13th century ask not for understanding but ask for the fire. And the fire begins in the book that they killed the man with fire one night they strapped them in the open chair and pumped electricity through his body until he was dead. Killing was illegal act. No religious leaders or protesters that killing that night. But i was there and i saw it with my own eyes. And what i saw set my soul on fire, a fire that burns in me still. Now it is the account how i came to be in that killing chamber that night and that spiritual current that brought me there. Coming to an event tonight you are entering into a spiritual current. You dont know what will happen to you what would your sing to each other tonight or what fires will raise in your soul. You dont know that you came. Thats what helps us grow and always what needs to happen in a community yes we can get information to your hands we have to be with community we have to be and reflect and thats how we grow as a society. You all should have gotten a bookmark we will make sure you get one when the book assigned and the quotation is each of us is more than the worst we have ever done which i think is such a valuable thing for all of us to remember. One of the lessons of dead man walking is perhaps this is even more relevant today than in 1993 those causing additional secondary harm that it injures the families and the victims but every person whose life they touch from the janitors to the Prison Guards and administrators. Everyone is injured by the Death Penalty existing and maybe we are by the prison system across the board. So can you talk about the perspective what we know psychologically know how much harm is done to create more trauma in the children of people what will it take to bring a change of consciousness for americans . Those who have been witnesses and say let me tell you what happened to me when i came out of execution at night watching can be electrocuted to death and then walked around the parking lot for a while. But the first thing i did is i threw up and i vomited because i had never witnessed a human being lock down the room and a premeditated hall of death strapped and killed. But the second thing at night that happened in the parking lot i thought of the American People they are nowhere close to this they will look at a tv thing tomorrow or read it in the newspaper of a terrible crime he was executed justice was done. He killed and got what he deserved. But they dont talk about killing a human being and what is involved. That is more than the worst thing they have ever done. As he was driving me to the prison that these people are human beings. And that transcendence that declaration of human rights Eleanor Roosevelt to get that established after the holocaust of the atrocities of world war ii article three everybody has a right to life the any role human rights that government doesnt give them for Good Behavior taken way for bad behavior article five nobody is subjected to torture or cool and unusual punishment what could be more cruel than taking a human being to put them in a small sale for 20 years and then say they are coming for you than they walked down the hall and kill you. Human beings are imaginative they cannot help but anticipate. I had to have a root canal one time i know this is small compared to the big stuff but then im thinking about that root canal by the Time Thursday came that is just a little human thing but now imagine when you scratch the calendar off this is my will last wednesday alive now friday is my last day but your conscious and imaginative but now you are taken and killed. How do we not recognize what is happening . It is not just the bookmark to continue this conversation on social media and keep it through twitter and the internet because you have to keep the conversation alive. I was drawn into this and i learned when i was been with the murderer. The most shameful sad funeral i had ever been that to bury your child the state considers them so horrible that we have to kill your child and heres the press hovering his mama fainted dead away in the funeral home. There was the press hovering at the door and then they got into the funeral home one was chasing the press at one out and throwing her shoe at him in the parking lot theyre just trying to bury their son who was killed by the state of louisiana with great shame. And another person who had three clients in louisiana and then his mom and his daddy they could not stand the terrible thing the sun had done for now were talking about odysseus and with the cyclops and at the time of the killing and that if he got out of the cave were trying to find him a sheep and we can get him out alive. That sheep was his constitutional right. But then you go and look at these trials is anyone surprised that the criteria that the Supreme Court set up when they put the Death Penalty back in georgia in 19764 years after the constitution that it is only for the worst of the worst. Now you look at over 1000 people who have been shot and electrocuted and lethal injecte injected. They are all poor. Which means they cannot have an expert defense because they are often overworked and underpaid but they have 100 cases so their Constitutional Rights at trial we dont have the adversarial system of coming to truth so people are found guilty and sentenced to death so you have to try to find that sheep in the constitutional field. I thought you would have a whole fresh chance but all of this has been a learning experience. But there are certain dates that close behind you once you walk out of that courtroom and you have to do it within a certain time but now with the Anti Terrorism and Death Penalty act and now we file those federal appeals and i have to find a lawyer, look at the issues and if youre lawyer at trial was so inadequate that they did not raise an objection with the allwhite jury of the jury of his peers a white woman was killed in louisiana but because he was so poor did not raise an objection a black man with an allwhite jury that the appeal cannot be considered it was not in the transcript for the lawyer to make a formal objection. I didnt know any of this. All this is reported in dead man walking. So now to be with the trial of jesus is to be a holy mistake and levitate but it was more than just asking to solve the problems of the world for catching on fire from prayer that meeting people and seeing their suffering. And doing what i could. But once you have that passion you cant shake it. Maybe i will go to graduate school or do something else. No. Because its like a wave in your boat is on it there is a deep commitment to something now you know something is happened to you. Thank god that god will you. I have to be here and i have to write this book but the way you wake up may be different but religion, we need to get religion right. We need to get christianity right. There was a senator in wyoming they were voting to repeal the Death Penalty they barely ever used it so they are close to repealing it and then it comes to her and she says im about to keep it because of jesus had not been executed by the romans we would not have been saved from our sins. There is no understanding of the crucifixion of jesus and how does a substitutionary sacrifice of a human being to satisfy the divine right to say this . What saves us is the love and compassion that helps us get past our ego and the love that jesus shared its and all the spiritual traditions compassion for all beings that we are all connected to one another we cannot separate ourselves from each other. And then we catch it and then we begin to act. With the presence of africanamerican who became my teachers jesse worked in the yard i didnt even know their last name. I went to Sacred Heart Church to make that first Holy Communion to make that body of christ separate. And i was not a bad person. Were not bad people because we are white because once you see the hurt africanAmerican People became my teachers. Okay we are waking up. Take her through it. [laughter] like institutional racism. White good. And how that works of the criminal justice. And in the educational system and the Banking System we has some very deep works to central to be racism in this country one is a 1619 project the New York Times is just publishing the other is a book stamped from the beginning and you read the language of the ones who wrote it and look at the language. Black inferior even Abraham Lincoln call six people into the white house and tells the black and white people to get together to free slaves but i have a deal. We will free you of what we want you to do was go back to the country where you came from. Was Abraham Lincoln a bad and racist or terrible man cracks we have been waking up ever since. This is just