Get your copy of our weekly print products at any of these convenient locations.
Edgewood grads hear of nun's passion
'Dead Man Walking' inspiration Prejean shares mission
Personally witnessing the execution of her pen pal, a Louisiana death row inmate, lit a fire in Helen Prejean -- a fire she wanted to spark in others Sunday during her commencement speech to Edgewood College graduates at the Alliant Energy Center.
"I want to talk to you about catching on fire. I want to talk to you about passion -- that you might lead a life of passion," Prejean told the class of 2008.
When she began writing to Patrick Sonnier, who was executed in 1984 for the murders of two teenagers, she didn't know he would die before her eyes 2-1/2 years later. She was at his execution as his spiritual adviser.
"You don't walk away from something like that neutral," said the 69-year-old nun. She said she came out of Louisiana's Angola State Prison afterward, in the middle of the night, and threw up.
"I had never watched a human being being killed," she said. "I knew the reason they were killing him. I knew the Supreme Court said it was all right. But I had seen it, and my mind was changed, and my mission began."
In introducing Prejean and awarding her an honorary doctorate, Edgewood College President Daniel Carey said, "Her commitment to justice and compassion, her leadership and her written works align with the values and mission that shape Edgewood College."
Carey presented degrees to nearly 200 undergraduates, and to more than 50 master's and doctoral candidates.
Prejean has received at least six other honorary degrees for her work against the death penalty, including degrees from Seton Hall University in New Jersey and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The self-proclaimed "Cajun" nun said it took her a long time to wake up to justice and realize "that Jesus is on the side of the poor." The daughter of a lawyer, she led a privileged life, with servants in her childhood home and a trip to Europe at age 15, she said.
"I had never gone over to where poor people were in New Orleans. You know, the ones you heard about in Hurricane Katrina -- 100,000 people were left behind in that city who didn't have cars. They were left to drown. No buses were provided for them. In many ways, we let our poor people drown in the city," she said.
When she began to correspond with Sonnier, Prejean was living among the poor in the St. Thomas housing projects, where she said African-Americans taught her about "the other America."
"I learned what it's like when you're poor and a person of color -- your relationship to the police, what happens to you in school, what happens to you if you don't have health care. I learned it all from the bottom up," she said.
Prejean, who talked colloquially, admitted that she didn't know who Susan Sarandon was before the actress contacted her about turning Prejean's book, "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States," into what became a popular 1995 movie.
"Susan Sarandon has been nominated four other times and got an Oscar for portraying me, a nun, and it was hard for her to do that role because she didn't have much makeup and she didn't like to wear those clothes she wore as a nun," Prejean said.
Sarandon won the Academy Award because she had a passion, Prejean said, adding that her own passion came out while writing the book -- which was for sale in the Coliseum's lobby with the proceeds going to the The Moratorium Campaign against the death penalty, Prejean's effort to obtain a moratorium on capital punishment.
Prejean said her sister advised her not to let Hollywood touch her book because, she said, nuns never come off well on-screen.
"And if you've ever seen 'The Flying Nun' -- all of those stupid nun movies -- they don't know what to do with nuns in Hollywood," Prejean said.
For the last 24 years Helen Prejean has worked toward ending capital punishment.
