To Pope Francis from Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ: An Appeal to Fully Respect the Dignity of Women

RIVER OF FIRE: My Spiritual Journey
Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ
RANDOM House, New York

Appendix A:
A Letter to Pope Francis
An Appeal for the Catholic Church to Fully Respect the Dignity of Women
Personally delivered to him on January 21, 2016

Dear Pope Francis,

As I pray I feel the Holy Spirit stirring my heart to use the occasion of meeting you to share a deep concern I have for our Church. An ache and sorrow, actually. I rejoice as I watch your stalwart efforts to renew our Church, especially in the area of collegiality and empowerment of the laity. But over my many years of service within the Church (I’m just two years younger than you), I am saddened to encounter over and over a very deep wound at the heart of the Church, a wound which I am convinced infects and weakens every aspect of Church life. That wound, Holy Father, is the way the Church treats women. Except for a few token representatives, women’s voices are not directly heard in plenary synods, commissions, and tribunals. This thwarts the dynamic effect we women could have on dialogue and decision making in the fashioning of church policies and practices.

Women’s absence in these arenas is a huge loss depriving the Church of the practical wisdom women have from faith lived on the ground in daily life and from insights gained in our pondering God’s word in our hearts. Women’s access into Church forums in which we can share these experiences could do much to help our Church become more supple (open to surprises of the Holy Spirit), less cerebral and abstract, less rule bound and authoritarian. In short, more real. Not to mention less patriarchal and less clerical. How can we have a healthy Church that truly embodies the compassionate mind and heart of Christ if our males are deprived of a steady diet of give and take dialogue with women as equals (by ‘equal’ I mean fully empowered by the Holy Spirit)? The truth is Holy Father, in the Church as institution, the baptism of girls and women seems not to be fully empowering us with God’s Holy Spirit as is the baptism of boys and men. Thus, in institutional structures of the Church, women’s ways of ‘imaging’ God is muted. Simply because we are women there are certain opportunities of service from which we are systematically excluded.

If I may use my own life experience as an example: My ministry to awaken citizens on the issue of the death penalty (actually to evangelize them: Jesus and his teaching are at the heart of every talk I give) has brought m to speak to UN commissions, Congress, governors, citizens in civic groups, and religious bodies all over the United States and other countries. In Protestant churches I am allowed to preach, yet in my own Church I am not permitted to preach a homily. in fact, because I am a woman (a member of the laity, actually), I am not even permitted to proclaim the Gospel at mass. Present liturgical rules prohibit me from proclaiming the Gospel. My voice is muted in my own Church whom I love and have served all of my life. It is a wound, a pain, an ache that never goes away not only for me, but for all women. No doubt it is one of the reasons why young women as well as older ones distance themselves from the Catholic Church. They know they will never be admitted to full participation. They feel discounted, disrespected. What a loss of vibrancy to the Body of Christ.

This saddens me immensely. Somehow over the years, we in the Church have lost the kind of shared ministry Jesus had on the road with his disciples, both women and men, and that Paul shared with women as he established Christian churches far beyond the confines of Palestine. How can we once again recover that vibrancy?

I hope this doesn’t weary your spirit. You have already quickened life in our Church in a way I haven’t witnessed since Vatican II. I rejoice in your boldness and your joy. I love that you’re getting us out of building and rigid rule following and leading us to the hurting ones on the margins of society and even into the suffering of Mother Earth herself. I thank God for sending you to us and I pray for you every time I think of you which is often.

Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ

I am in heart and training a religious educator so I can’t help but begin to imagine a three to five year catechetical (educational) pathway whereby the entire Church might be enabled to learn and dialogue and grow together toward a fuller understanding and embodiment of every women and man as full fledged, participating members of the Body of Christ. A huge task. But with the fire of the Holy Spirit and with the trust in each other, surely God will accomplish in us more than we can dream or imagine. One thing I do know, Pope Francis, I TRUST YOU.

Love abounding in Christ,
Love,
Sister Helen P

______________________________

Sister Helen Prejean is known around the world for her tireless work against the death penalty.  She has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s vigorous opposition to all executions.

Born on April 21, 1939, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she joined the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1957. After studies in the USA and Canada, she spent the following years teaching high school, and serving as the Religious Education Director at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in New Orleans and the Formation Director for her religious community.

In 1982, she moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans in order to live and work with the poor. While there, Sister Helen began corresponding with Patrick Sonnier, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of two teenagers. Two years later, when Patrick Sonnier was put to death in the electric chair, Sister Helen was there to witness his execution. In the following months, she became spiritual advisor to another death row inmate, Robert Lee Willie, who was to meet the same fate as Sonnier.

After witnessing these executions, Sister Helen realized that this lethal ritual would remain unchallenged unless its secrecy was stripped away, and so she sat down and wrote a book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. Dead Man Walking hit the shelves when national support for the death penalty was over 80% and, in Sister Helen’s native Louisiana, closer to 90%. The book ignited a national debate on capital punishment and it inspired an Academy Award winning movie, a play and an opera. Sister Helen also embarked on a speaking tour that continues to this day.

Sister Helen works with people of all faiths and those who follow no established faith, but her voice has had a special resonance with her fellow Catholics. Over the decades, Sister Helen has made personal approaches to two popes, John Paul II and Pope Francis, urging them to establish the Catholic Church’s position as unequivocally opposed to capital punishment under any circumstances. After Sister Helen’s urging, under John Paul II the catechism was revised to strengthen the church’s opposition to executions, although it allowed for a very few exceptions. Not long after meeting with Sister Helen in August of 2018, Pope Francis announced new language of the Catholic Catechism which declares that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person, with no exceptions. 

Today, although capital punishment is still on the books in 30 states in the USA, it has fallen into disuse in most of those states. Prosecutors and juries alike are turning away from death sentences, with the death penalty becoming increasingly a geographical freak. Sister Helen continues her work, dividing her time between educating the public, campaigning against the death penalty, counseling individual death row prisoners, and working with murder victims’ family members. Sister Helen’s second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, was published in 2004; and her third book, River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey, in 2019.

https://www.sisterhelen.org/