Pod Insights Criminal Sister Helen About this episode In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean was invited to write a letter to a man on death row named Elmo Patrick Sonnier. She told us, “I thought that all I was going to be doing was writing letters. And lo and behold, two years later, I am in that execution chamber.” When we spoke to her in 2021, she was 81, and had been present at the executions of six men.
Sister Helen’s book, Dead Man Walking, is about her time as a spiritual advisor to Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie.
This episode was originally released in 2021.
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Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 I'm Ina Garten and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloé Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.
0:39 Speaker 01 How much more would you get done with a personal assistant in your pocket?
0:43 Speaker 02 Life's too short to be manually filing insurance claims and being on hold waiting for the lab tests that the doctor did. I don't know, I feel like it's allowing me to show up in ways that I've always wished I could show up. I just am so strapped for time.
0:58 Speaker 01 What we gain and give up when AI agents enter the picture. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Listen to new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
1:15 Speaker 03 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?
1:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I am.
1:29 Speaker 03 How is New Orleans today?
1:31 Speaker 04 It's fine from what I can see from my house. You know, 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.
1:46 Speaker 03 Oh, I'm sorry.
1:51 Speaker 04 He had a lot of underlying conditions. He was 76. So it's just a terrible disease. And we're Louisiana. People love being with each other. And you can just see how people get it because they want to have these gatherings and people 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 hit such a terrible road if he had made it through. And so I'm glad God took him.
2:29 Speaker 03 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?
2:49 Speaker 04 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, a reporter was interviewing him. There'd been another shooting in the projects here in New Orleans.
3:28 Speaker 04 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 gonna die. That's what's impossible. Everybody dies but me, you know, that feeling. So it's just a big old mystery.
4:13 Speaker 04 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 I've 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, you're stunned, in a way.
4:57 Speaker 04 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. Uh, 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.
5:37 Speaker 03 I wonder if, if you'd mind introducing yourself.
5:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd like to say about time.
5:46 Speaker 03 I, I, I would have, I would have stopped you, but I like to hear you talk. So I just said, well, we'll get her name later.
5:55 Speaker 04 Nothing like drinking from a fire hose. Okay. I'm Sister Helen Prejean. I'm a sister of St. Joseph, a Catholic nun.
6:06 Speaker 03 When Sister Helen Prejean was young, she declared that she would either grow 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?
6:30 Speaker 04 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. Cause I've been out there so much. I guess I got street grad 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 blooming head off. I mean, because you can still talk and be present to groups. And so I'm doing a lot of that.
7:02 Speaker 03 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
7:08 Speaker 03 Tell me a little bit about your life before you became known a nun. Where did you grow up?
7:15 Speaker 04 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 the backseat, 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, and we begin a rosary. And by the time you go through all the mysteries of the rosary and the life of Christ, you have 150 Hail Marys done, and a whole bunch of Our Fathers, and another prayer of glory being, you've got some quieter kids. I call it Catholic Prozac.
7:59 Speaker 04 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 gonna do. And that's what I did. And have been a nun ever since.
8:24 Speaker 03 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?
8:33 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. Because I belonged 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's 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.
9:12 Speaker 04 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,
9:55 Speaker 04 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 questioning 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?
10:38 Speaker 04 And you gotta go sit and wait from 11 o'clock at night till 3:00 in the morning with a sick child before some tired little intern is gonna 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. You know, my daddy had worked hard. He had come out of poverty, became a lawyer. I just, I, because when you're white and you have the privilege that comes just with never being questioned, because of the color of your skin is 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.
11:23 Speaker 04 Or I wasn't scared when I'd be stopped for speeding, which has happened more than once, by policemen. I wasn't scared of them. So I awakened to all this, see? And, uh, and, 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.
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14:29 Speaker 03 In 1978, a 28-year-old man named Elmo Patrick Sonnier was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a teenage girl and the murder of a teenage boy. His brother, Eddie James Sonnier, was ultimately given a life sentence for his role in the murders. Sister Helen Prejean was asked to write Patrick Sonnier a letter. Tell me a little bit about when you got that letter saying, "Would you like to cor-" I mean, was it just, "Give this man some comfort? Give him someone to speak to?" What was the ask?
15:08 Speaker 04 It was Chava Cohen coming down St. Andrews Street with a clipboard, and everybody he met that day, he was gonna invite him to be part of this project. And he bumps into me. He says, "Hey, Sister Helen, you wanna be a pen pal? Somebody on death row?" I go, "Yeah, I could do that." You know, as an English major, I figured I could write some nice letters, maybe a poem or two. It was just to 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.
15:53 Speaker 04 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 forms. And in the visitor forms, 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 so I filled out the form.
16:39 Speaker 04 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? Right to that execution chamber. Can you do that? I would have said, heck, no, I can't do that. But it unfurled.
17:13 Speaker 03 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?
17:42 Speaker 04 Surreal, you got the right word, 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 gonna die. In fact, you've gotten a stay of execution, and they bring you back to your cell. Then you're brought back a week later, and you get another stay of execution. Then you're brought back another week later, and then they kill you.
18:28 Speaker 04 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, six people execution. The nightmare everybody has is, they're coming for me. The guards are coming to my cell. They're dragging me out. I'm kicking, screaming, going, "No, no." And then I wake up, and I look around, I'm in my cell. It's a dream. But they are gonna be coming for me. Then you watch as others are led. It is the definition of torture, is an extreme mental
19:10 Speaker 04 or physical assault on someone rendered defenseless. What greater mental assault or suffering could there be than to be told, "We're gonna kill you in two weeks. We're gonna 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 6 o'clock. This is at Terre Haute. This is on December 10, ironically, Human Rights Day. And so I'm praying. I stopped everything I'm doing to try to accompany him, pray for him spiritually, that his passage would be without suffering.
19:55 Speaker 04 And at 6:20, 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. Gets to be 6:20, gets to be 7:20. 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 8 something, the guards come and said, "Time to go." And they take him and they kill him. Because it's in human hands and human machinations
20:39 Speaker 04 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.
20:49 Speaker 03 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?
21:08 Speaker 04 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.
21:53 Speaker 04 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, um, and he gives me a lot of courage. And so, but then I'm an advocate, see? When somebody's innocent, you gotta 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?
22:38 Speaker 04 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, uh, that is just happening right now with this case, where we're getting in an expert on DNA to, 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 gonna have innocent people in this system that are gonna end up being on death row. No wonder we have a mistake rate as high as we do.
23:14 Speaker 03 Does he think he's, he's going to be executed?
23:18 Speaker 04 He doesn't know. It's a slow death, being in prison the way it is. I'm, you know, he, 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, uh, and people have been executed, you know? So it's always over him. It's, it's always that cloud over him. He's never completely free of it until they would lift the death sentence off of him. Uh, and he's really clear that he wants to press for his innocence, that of course he wants death to be lifted,
24:01 Speaker 04 but he wants to work to get, to prove his innocence so that he can be freed. It's unbelievable suffering, Phoebe, that people go through and it's see. 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? Is people are unawake about the issue. They don't know. 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,
24:45 Speaker 04 all these federal executions. People don't see it. There've 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.
24:59 Speaker 03 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?
25:18 Speaker 04 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.
25:44 Speaker 03 How do you offer comfort to someone in a position in the last moments of their life? How, that feels like a great,
25:54 Speaker 03 burden's not the right word, responsibility. What can you say to make someone feel better?
26:04 Speaker 04 I am here for you.
26:07 Speaker 04 In fact, with Patrick Sonnier. 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 don't know what, I've never done this before, but I know this. You are not gonna 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.
26:51 Speaker 04 And they know, they'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, and not to be able to stop it, not to be able to do something. And so different. You know, I've been with people in the hospital who died. They fade, they... You can see life ebbing out of them, but to be fully alive, fully conscious, and then to walk across this, you know, room here into this place where they're gonna kill you. It's one...
27:36 Speaker 04 You know, the Catholic Church, I played a little part in helping the Catholic Church develop on this issue that we cannot ever give over to states the right to take life. Uh, 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, you know, it was Patrick Sonnier,
28:20 Speaker 04 is the one I was mentioning to him. And they have him shackled hand and foot. He's surrounded by six guards. He's being, he's completely defenseless and they're gonna 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.
29:04 Speaker 04 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,
29:49 Speaker 04 "Even those among us who have done a terrible crime have an inviolable dignity that must not be taken from them."
29:58 Speaker 03 Do you believe in good and evil?
30:04 Speaker 04 That's a tricky question.
30:09 Speaker 03 You feel, you feel like the right person to ask. I don't want to answer.
30:12 Speaker 04 I don't know. Let's go ask that nun about good and evil. I mean, people have written, 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,
30:56 Speaker 04 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.
31:22 Speaker 03 We'll be right back.
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33:16 Speaker 03 Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know Criminal sent you. It's the best way to support the show. Sister Helen Prejean was present at the execution of Patrick Sonnier in 1984. She's been present at the executions of six men. 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 Sonnier.
33:59 Speaker 03 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?
34:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's really important for us to talk about. Um, I didn't know what to do about the victims' families when I took that first man on death row, Patrick Sonnier, 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. And 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, to, for this person, Patrick Sonnier, to live or for him to die.
35:19 Speaker 04 There were only a few names on the life side in that. And that's when I met the, the families. The parents of both of those young people 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 Sonnier, because of his human rights, should not be executed? And they were there, you know, with all their friends and all their neighbors, relatives, packed the room to just say, "We are asking for the execution." And they had been told, part of this is, they were told by the prosecution, "This is the way you honor your dead child.
36:04 Speaker 04 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 boy's parents, Lloyd and Eula LeBlanc.
36:42 Speaker 04 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 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.
37:25 Speaker 04 Like, oh, you killed my son, like you condone in it. Oh, it's okay. You killed my son. It's okay." He said, "Weakness." All I knew was that I was gonna 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. Sonnier, 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 hear, "Oh, there she is, the mother of the murderers.
38:07 Speaker 04 What's she doing in here? What is she doing in our town?" And one day she, Mrs. Sonnier, hears 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, "Mrs. Sonnier, 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 Dead Man Walking.
38:52 Speaker 04 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, you know, that same kind of hurt to be visited on another human being and their life taken.
39:10 Speaker 04 Ever after that, Phoebe, you gotta 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. Lloyd de Blois 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
39:54 Speaker 04 because they put you, you know, on this, on one side or the other."
39:59 Speaker 03 How has this worked? You know, 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?
40:24 Speaker 04 It's affected my life profoundly, that you've 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
41:08 Speaker 04 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 gotta speak out."
41:19 Speaker 03 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?
41:39 Speaker 04 I think 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, 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.
42:23 Speaker 04 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's... 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
43:07 Speaker 04 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.
43:19 Speaker 03 Sister Helen Prejean 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."
43:33 Speaker 03 I want to thank you so much for taking this time to talk to me today. And I'm very sorry about your brother.
43:42 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thank you. It was a good thank you. Thanks, Phoebe.
44:01 Speaker 03 Manuel Ortiz is still on death row. Sister Helen Prejean is still visiting him. She's 86 years old.
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