By Lois Rogers | Correspondent

To hear Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille Helen Prejean tell it, and tell it frankly she did at Monmouth University in Long Branch April 17, she did not set out on her vocation to change the world, end the death penalty or serve the poor.

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Before Sister Helen began living among the poor, ministering to prisoners on death row, writing “Dead Man Walking,” the celebrated book about her prison ministry experiences, or advocating on a global scale for peace and economic justice, she had what she described the other night as a privileged existence.

Relaxed, confident and engaging as she stood at a podium in Stately Wilson Hall with a two-hour presentation that drew the university’s four-day, 14th annual Global Understanding Convention – Practicing Non-Violence in a Violent World – to a close, Sister Helen shared how secure and well structured her early life had been.

“I was raised in a strong family that surrounded me with love,” she shared with the approximately 100 faculty members, students and members of the community at large who had come to hear her. She noted the gift of a fine, Catholic education that included learning how to speak well, a skill she clearly prizes. “I learned public speaking,” she said, noting that’s a skill largely denied to poor people in her native Louisiana.

“When you can speak,” she said, “you have purchase,” she said. Such educational gifts “draw us forth and set the stage for upward mobility.” Without such footing, she said, “it’s no wonder so many poor people end up in jail.”

Born in 1939 in Baton Rouge, she joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille (now known as the congregation of St. Joseph) in 1957 and received a bachelor of arts degree in English and education from St. Mary Dominican College, New Orleans, and a master of arts degree in religious education from St. Paul University, Ottawa.

She shared that her early days in the order were spent teaching religion to junior and senior high school students in an atmosphere that sheltered her from the misery around her. That changed in the years following the Second Vatican Council when the Sisters of St. Joseph began to “consider what we were going to do about social justice and focusing on the preferential option for the poor.

In her soft, but steady Louisiana drawl, she continued: “I really didn’t know any poor people,” focusing on their situation with prayer instead of action. When she had to attend a conference on the subject, she dreaded spending several days there, but the encounter instead would change her life.

“It came to me as an enlightenment, a gift … an awakening. I realized that while so many people in the world starve, we go to Weight Watchers to lose weight.” It was a profound experience, she said, and at the age of 40, it changed her “spiritual trajectory.”

She began to focus on the first three centuries of the Church when “we lived the Gospel,” lived in community where everyone depended on each other and shared resources. She said she began to realize that “Jesus preached the Good News to the poor” and that the Catholic Church is anchored in its outreach to the poor.

During the presentation, Sister Helen said as this journey unfolded, she came to realize that “poverty is not God’s will. You can resist it.”

She described how she moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project and began work at Hope House, a center that assists public housing residents, devoting her ministry to the poor of New Orleans. There, she expanded her understanding of how marginalized poverty makes people, denying them the skills they need to improve their circumstances, making them destined for prison.

It was while living in the St. Thomas Housing project, she said, that her community urged the sisters to become pen pals with prisoners.

Her journey took a complex turn when her pen pal turned out to be Patrick Sonnier, a convicted killer sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. She eventually began to visit him and he would ask her to be his spiritual adviser. Two years later, she would be there with him at the prison death house, the only person allowed to be at his side for the last hours of his life, and would witness his execution.

She told her audience that had she known the circumstances of the crime when she initiated contact with him – how he and his brother had mercilessly slaughtered two teenagers parked in a lovers lane – she might not have been able to step forward to visit him, let alone become his spiritual adviser.

And, she added, had she known that he would have looked directly into her face as he died, she might not have been able to do it.

“When I found out about the crime, I was horrified. Anyone can be nice in letters. I never talked to a murderer before,” said Sister Helen. “I was glad for the screen that separated us. Then I saw how human his face was,” she said, and decided to journey with him to the end.

In a compelling portion of the talk, she acknowledged that her “big mistake” during the events leading up to his execution two years later, was never reaching out to the families of the slain boy and girl, “the people on the crest of the waves.” She spoke sorrowfully about meeting Lloyd LeBlanc, whose son Sonnier was convicted of murdering.

She quoted LeBlanc as saying: “you never came to see us. We had no one to talk to and you weren’t there for us. He took me into his journey even though I got it wrong – he brought me into his journey of forgiveness,” saying that “that they killed our son, but I’m not going to let them kill me.”

Her remarks about the need for forgiveness struck a poignant chord during a week when death penalty cases were prominent in the news regarding the Boston Marathon and Murrow Building bombings. The passionate advocate for ending the death penalty called for a “global conference on ending the death penalty. We need to gather together to work on this, otherwise, we’ll remain stuck in what we’ve done.

“It’s time to do away with the death penalty. You can see the bubbles coming up in the pond.”

The catalyst for such a move, she said, is education, especially where race and class are concerned.

“We are color coded in so many ways,” she said. “When I was growing up, I never questioned the Jim Crow laws,” she said. Education and life experience changed that. At heart, she said, “people are good. The problem is they’ve never been given a chance to understand and there’s plenty to learn.”

She exhorted everyone in the room, especially the young people, to “learn how to mix it up, bring people together. As long as we are separate and never look into each others’ eyes, this will continue.”

After the talk, student Sloane Ginsburg, who is studying political science, talked about the affect Sister Helen’s presentation had on her.

“She spoke from the heart,” Ginsburg said. “I thought it was very moving because she took a huge leap to do what she did.”