This week I spent a lot of time reading Dead Man Walking (1992) by Sister Helen Prejean. As I wrote about in an earlier blog post, the book is sort of memoir combined with nonfiction, interjected with a lot of philosophical and spiritual interludes, because Sister Prejean is a Catholic nun. The book details her experiences working as a spiritual advisor for two men on death row in the infamous Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary. At the beginning of the book, she’s a young nun who’s only recently become enlightened to the possibility that as a Catholic she is not only spiritual but also intrinsically positioned to oppose social injustice. She’s working as an educator in a housing project when she is approached by a lawyer friend, who asks her to serve as a spiritual advisor for Patrick Sonnier, a convicted rapist and murderer who’s set to be executed within the year. 

While reading this book, it is impossible for me to not think about what I know and don’t know, because that is precisely what Sister Prejean spends a lot of time talking about in the book. As a white, middle class child in the South, she was super sheltered until she became a nun and was, ironically, exposed to the injustices around her. However, her work in impoverished African-American urban neighborhoods was incredibly different from the world she became a part of as a spiritual advisor to two Cajun white men on death row in Angola, one of whom was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. 

What I admire so much about Sister Prejean is that she was able to distinguish between what she knew and didn’t know. She didn’t know whether or not Patrick Sonnier or Robert Willie were guilty of the crimes they were charged with, and she could never fully know what it would be like to sit in a cell for many years, awaiting your own murder by the state. What she did know, however, was how to use the legal system to manipulate the spiritual and moral sympathies of the men who controlled the prison, and how to use spirituality and empathy to serve as a friend and legal counsel for both men.