On death row

Interview, Jan, 1996 by Tim Robbins

Challenging criminologists, government officials, and even the pope himself, Roman Catholic nun Sister Helen Prejean's courageous memoir about her experiences with prisoners on death row, Dead Man Walking [Vintage], shook the moral ground on which the divisive issue of the death penalty has long stood. Now, directing his second feature, actor Tim Robbins has brought Sister Helen's eloquent argument against capital punishment to the screen in a deeply humanistic new film, also titled Dead Man Walking, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. As portrayed by Sarandon, who first called the book to Robbins's attention, Sister Helen is a frank and complex figure, taking her faith out of the cloister and into an ambiguous world. Penn's performance as death-row inmate Matthew Poncelet refuses to sentimentalize the character. Robbins spoke with Sister Helen at her home in a New Orleans housing project, where she was finishing a new book on the role of women in the church. Here they discuss her life, what she's doing, and why.

TIM ROBBINS: How did you first come to be a nun?

SISTER HELEN PREJEAN: I joined the sisterhood in the late '50s, at the end of high school. I had been taught by the Sisters of St. Joseph, and I liked them. They were warm, human, humorous, and smart. I come from a very Catholic family, and at night I'd hear my mom and dad saying the rosary, praying that somebody in the family would dedicate their life to God, so I got a lot of support on the home front. I very much wanted to be a saint; I wanted to be the best. Then, in 1962, Vatican II [the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XIII and continued under Paul VI until 1965 for the purposes of spiritual renewal of the church and to reconsider its position in the modern world] took place, bringing in all kinds of changes. For one thing, we took off the habit, which had separated us from others. Before that, people were kind of in awe of us. We'd float past them in our long black skirts, but when we took the habit off we became human. That was good, but it was also scary because suddenly we had new freedoms. We began to go among people, as Jesus did. My calling to be on the side of the poor and the marginalized developed out of that. So there are vocations within vocations, and I've been different kinds of nuns at different times.

TR: What does your faith mean to you?

SHP: Religion is about loving everyone in the human family. But often it has no voice in the places where social policy is made. It has been pushed out of the public domain. In the past, movies that have been made about nuns either showed us as flakes, or as naive, like children, or a flying nun, or it's Sister Act, which is just fun. Nobody has presented the depth of a person of faith who uses that faith to make a difference in social issues. There is a great line in this film, Dead Man Walking, in which the father of a murdered boy says to the nun, "I don't have your faith." And she replies, "It's not faith. It's work." I love that.

TR: Wouldn't the church claim that it was always working with poor people, always interested in communities?

SHP: You can trace the church's history of siding with labor, and its stance that workers have a right to strike, and saying the poor have a right to health care, and so forth. But in the lived experience of the church, its leaders have often been on the side of the rich. Who do they go to lunch with? They go with benefactors, people who have money and power. The social teachings are called the best-kept secret in the Catholic Church.

TR: So the official policy of the church, in the past and even in the present, is different from the actual work of the church.

SHP: Yes, but what I'm saying about the social teachings of the church is that the words have been there, but not the action.

TR: But didn't the pope recently come out against the death penalty? Isn't that taking action?

SHP: The pope's position does not go far enough. It does not say that we can never allow the state to execute anybody. Even though he says that instances where the death penalty is taken should be rare, if not nonexistent, he still accepts the theory that the state could execute human beings. And the challenge I would give back to him is: "Your Holiness, if you would allow circumstances where the state can kill people, then it means you don't just believe that someone else should do it, you believe that you could carry it out yourself. But can you picture yourself throwing the switch?" I don't believe he really would, but it is important to translate theory by bringing ideas into the lived experience. Psalm 24 says that to see the face of God, we have to have pure hearts, but we must also have clean hands. I think the position that he's taken doesn't leave clean hands. In my opinion, Amnesty International is farther along in that than the pope. They hold that governments are never allowed to kill its citizens.

TR: Are you allowed to disagree with the pope?

SHP: Of course we're allowed to disagree. Otherwise, the hierarchy would need truth police all over the world.