The New Yorker:

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of a work based on Sister Helen Prejean’s book occasions an unusual presentation of its message.

By Paul Elie 

The epigraph to Sister Helen Prejean’s book “Dead Man Walking,” published in 1993, is from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: “I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting in Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come: for I’d noticed that Providence did always put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone.” Those lines signalled that this work by a Roman Catholic nun was literary, worldly, and irreverent in its way, and with a distinct regional tang—a story of life in her native Louisiana and the part of the country she called the Death Belt, where state executions were carried out and celebrated.

The suggestion that Prejean herself sought “the right words” with “no particular plan” seems an augury for her book’s eventual reception. Born in Baton Rouge in 1939, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph since her late teens, and trained as a schoolteacher, Prejean sought to renew her religious life at the age of forty, by going with several other sisters to work with the residents of a New Orleans housing project and live nearby. Invited by a person whom she met there to correspond with men on death row at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, she became a regular visitor, and the spiritual adviser (a role now protected by the Supreme Court) to two men whose executions were imminent: Elmo Patrick Sonnier, who, when invited to say his last words in the execution chamber, asked the father of one of his murder victims, who was looking on, to forgive him; and Robert Lee Willie, a white supremacist who was resolute in showing no remorse for the crimes he had committed. An unexpected best-seller, the book soon became a standard text for anti-death-penalty activists and a staple of high-school and college reading lists. A 1995 film adaptation, starring Susan Sarandon (who won an Oscar for her performance), eventually made Sister Helen, as she is known, a celebrity and a model for a justice-seeking Catholic in a period when the Church was disgraced by revelations of clerical sexual abuse.

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