Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  In the 1640s Fr. Medaille went to Le Puy as an itinerant missionary teacher, working in the towns in central and southern France and teaching youth in schools. Known as a gifted preacher and spiritual director, Medaille planted seeds of faith and inspired in others his vision of serving both the church and society as he went back and forth between the towns. In Le Puy he found a group of women eager to form a community around that purpose.

  At that time, France was in turmoil. The country was involved in many battles and wars, both at home and abroad. As is often the case, the poor were most affected. The government increased taxes to pay for the military. Many people landed in debtors’ prisons. Those battles left many widows and orphans in their wakes. Children were seen as a burden and often neglected or abused or both. Women turned to prostitution for income. The elderly and the sick who were poor languished. The situation was bleak.

  France was a hierarchal society with rank and class determining wealth and economics. While France was a largely Catholic country, the church often neglected ministering to those living in the rural areas, who were largely poor and uneducated.

  The hard times inspired some people to action. Six women came to Medaille and wanted to form a community that would help heal France through the Gospel. “Deep within they heard God’s call to be instruments to bring about unity in a broken world—to do all in their power to heal; bridge ruptures; bring about harmony of persons with God and of persons with one another,” wrote Sr. Eileen Mitchell in “Called to Inclusive Love: CSJ Charism, Spirituality, Mission.”6 John 17:21 inspired them: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also believe in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.”

  The spiritual and corporal works of mercy were their outline, which meant the women would not stay cloistered like the communities up until that point had done. They took their ministry to the people and served out in the community. This was new for the Catholic Church, and so naturally they faced some resistance from bishops.

  Unlike today, the women religious at that time came only from wealthy families and brought their dowries into the community. Religious life called for solemn vows and prayer but also left time for intellectual and artistic pursuits. The famous St. Teresa of Avila was one of those women with a dowry who entered religious life, but thankfully was touched by God and went on to reform the Carmelite community. (In 1970 she was proclaimed the first female Doctor of the Church. A saint whose writings are beneficial to the entire church are proclaimed Doctors of the Church. The first doctors—Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Pope Gregory I—were declared in 1298.)

  In the 1650s, women from the lower classes had no chance of entering religious life. However, prior to what Medaille called his “Little Design,” some people had tried, including saints Angela de Merici, Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal, Vincent de Paul, and Louise de Marillac. It was they who laid the groundwork for the Little Design to take root.

  Instead of seeking papal approval for their endeavor, the first Sisters of St. Joseph set up informal houses, independent of each other, rather than a central house, to meet the needs of the local community. Unbeknownst to the founders, this set the stage for how the congregation would organize itself for hundreds of years. Instead of a traditional habit worn by nuns, the sisters donned the clothes of widows to avoid detection that might force them into cloisters. At that time the law considered widows free and competent, so this allowed the sisters to move easily among the people they served. Because the sisters lived among the poor and dressed like them, they visibly stayed within class divisions that didn’t permit wealthy and noble-born people to mix with the poor.

  Medaille and the founding women knew they needed support from the church to succeed long term, and they found it in the local shepherd Bishop Henri de Maupas of Le Puy. Maupas was a disciple of St. Francis de Sales and an advocate for the poor. On October 15, 1651, he offered his official ecclesiastical sponsorship of the new community and accepted their commitment as religious for his diocese.

  Along with their spiritual formation, the congregation quickly identified the needs of the poor among them and devised ways to meet them. The charism drew women from around the country, and by the start of the French Revolution 150 years later, there were thirty communities around France with the support of the local bishops.

  Soon after the French Revolution began in 1789, the government suppressed religious communities. It dissolved the Sisters of St. Joseph and confiscated their goods and possessions. The sisters were denounced as fanatics and enemies of the people and the revolution. Several sisters were imprisoned, and five died by guillotine.

  Once the revolution ended, Catholic Church officials began to rebuild. A group of women came together in Lyon, France, as the “Black Daughters,” seeking to pray and work with the poor. Cardinal Joseph Fesch of Lyon recognized the need to help the suffering of France and remembered the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph. He called upon Mother St. John Fontbonne who had joined the community in 1778 and survived the revolution. She answered.

  On July 14, 1808, the women reconstituted a new congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Through Mother St. John, they had a direct connection to Medaille and the community’s establishment in 1650, and they began to grow again and spread. In 1823 at the request of the bishop of Belley in southern France, Mother St. John sent a sister from her motherhouse to organize twenty-seven congregations serving in his diocese. They became the Sisters of St. Joseph of Bourg.

  A rich French countess and a desperate bishop in Missouri were the means that brought the Sisters of St. Joseph to America in 1836. When Countess Felicite Rochejaquelein received word that Bishop Joseph Rosati in St. Louis needed help for his poor diocese, he told Mother St. John the countess would provide all the money they needed to answer his call. On March 5, 1836, six Sisters of St. Joseph arrived in New Orleans by boat and traveled up the Mississippi to St. Louis.

  Since their early days in the United States, the Sisters of St. Joseph were independent diocesan congregations. Unlike other communities such as the Franciscans or Dominicans, each congregation was local to a certain region.

  Sister Helen Prejean joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, which had established its roots in Mississippi and Louisiana. Their first sisters arrived from France in 1854 from Bourg and ended up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, a town on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and supported largely by fishing. They were sent there to start a school in nearby Waveland, located four miles away. Written histories of the community say that until the sisters could open a school in Bay St. Louis, they walked barefoot the four miles back and forth each day for several months so they could save their shoes.

  As is the case for all pioneers, those early days were rough going. The sisters needed to adjust to the hot, humid weather and the Southern American version of English. However, they persevered and grew in numbers with both French women and native-born American women joining their ranks. They firmly put down roots in Louisiana, establishing convents in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and New Roads, ministering as teachers and catechists to all people, no matter their race or class. Eventually members of the community branched out and established ministries “up north” in Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Canada.

  The sisters didn’t take the name the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille until 1977 when the Vatican officially recognized this group of sisters, with roots in Bourg, France, as their own community. They chose the name after their founder, Jesuit Fr. Jean Pierre Medaille.

  Some years before that, in the 1960s, congregations of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States who could trace their roots to Le Puy, France, united in a federation to preserve the unity of the spirit, charism, and history of the congregations. Later, in the 1990s, the federation divided itself into regions with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille encompassing the communities in Cincinnati, Ohio; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Crookston, Min
nesota. Today all of these communities dropped their town affiliations and are known as the Sisters of St. Joseph.

  From her entrance into the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1957 until the early 1980s, Sr. Helen served as a teacher, novice master, and religious educator in a parish. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from St. Mary Dominican College in New Orleans in 1962. In 1973 she earned a master’s in religious education from St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada.

  Reforms of the Second Vatican Council geared toward religious congregations of men and women energized Sr. Helen’s community and moved them from a focus on education to a focus on social justice. In her book Dead Man Walking, Sr. Helen wrote of how she was a little reluctant to jump on the social justice bandwagon. Her understanding of faith and religious life was one of a personal relationship with God. Entering into social justice work wasn’t easy or simple, and the answers to the problems weren’t either.

  It took Sr. Helen a long while before she grasped the social justice aspect of the Gospel. Part of it was because she was formed in a dualism straight out of the Greeks and Plato. She had learned that the eternal life, the unchanging eternal, is what lasts forever, and that the temporal, ephemeral, secular, transitive really doesn’t last. With that formation, a person sought an eternal union with God.

  Gradually she came to understand that it was a cohesive whole. Theology and the physical sciences existed and grew together. While it is imperative that every soul seeks heaven and the faithful are called to help others seek heaven, everyone is still called to help the poor, which Jesus said would always be among us. The church has long focused on justice for those on the margins. These teachings are commonly found in the social encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor) released by Pope Leo XIII in 1891; Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) released by Pope John XXIII in 1963; and Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) released by Pope John Paul II in 1995.

  It didn’t help that Sr. Helen didn’t know any real poor people. “I was living in white privilege and living in an elite class—the educated. My daddy had money and I was separated from poor people. I wasn’t mean or evil spirited, but I was simply naive and blind to the struggles of poor people,” she says.7

  Under her understanding, women religious were not social workers and were not meant to get involved in politics, become involved in social justice, or try to change things in the secular sphere. They were called to help everybody to know God. But Sr. Helen kept an open mind, and in 1980, at age forty, she “awakened to the Gospel of justice,” she says. That awakening came as her community gathered to decide its ministries for the forthcoming decade. Sociologist Sr. Marie Augusta Neal of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur addressed the community during its gathering in Terre Haute, Indiana, and laid out the injustices going on in the United States and around the world. What were the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille going to do to relieve some of the poor’s burdens, Neal challenged. The speaker proceeded to dismantle Sr. Helen’s arguments that nuns weren’t social workers and weren’t political.

  Neal talked about Jesus as the Good News for the poor. Of course God loved the poor, but it was not God’s will for some people to be poor and some people to be rich. The theology Sr. Helen had studied never talked about resistance to the evils of poverty, or that poverty is not God’s will. She accepted that some people were rich and some people were poor, and if poor people loved God and suffered with Jesus on the cross, one day they would have a higher place in heaven.

  “That’s about as naive as you can get when you’re somebody who is privileged and never had to endure their suffering like lack of health care, your children or your husband dying, or you dying because you don’t have health care,” she says.8

  Neal told the sisters that day that the Good News Jesus brings to the poor is that they would be poor no longer, that they had a right to resist poverty and work for what was rightfully theirs.

  Sister Helen was raised in the Jim Crow days when whites and blacks were segregated. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation in Southern states on both a state and local level. The only African American people Helen met growing up were house servants. She knew their first names but not their last names. While her mom and dad were kind to the servants, they never questioned the system that subjugated black people as second-class citizens who couldn’t even drink from the same water fountains as whites or sit with them in the movie theater. It was something the young Helen had not questioned. “Colored” and “White” signs hung over restroom doors, water fountains, and entrances designating who could use them. Segregation even existed in her home parish where black Catholics sat in a separate part of the church, and their children received the sacraments separately.

  At age twelve, Helen witnessed her first physical attack against a black person. She and a friend were on the bus one day in December 1952 heading to do their Christmas shopping. She was in seventh grade. Life was good, and Helen and her friends were joking with each other during the ride.

  When the bus reached their stop, and everyone was getting out, the driver shouted an obscenity to a young black woman and kicked her with his foot, throwing her off the bus. The woman fell to the sidewalk on her hands and knees, her purse flying open and coins spilling out onto the concrete. The young woman didn’t say anything or look at the driver. She just picked herself up and walked away. Helen felt awful and the event stayed with her.

  Memories like those continued to surface the longer Neal spoke during the seminar. The blinders fell from the nun’s eyes, mind, and heart. Sister Helen entered the talk thinking, “I’m spiritual, I’m apolitical. I don’t get involved in all the political stuff. We’re nuns, we’re not politicians.” Neal blew through Helen’s arguments. It was like she was reading Sr. Helen’s mind. Neal said, “You know, in a democracy, there’s no apolitical stance to take. If you’re not doing anything, then that means you’re supporting the status quo and that is a very political stance to take.” Sister Helen thought, “Dang, she got me—on Jesus and on the apolitical.”9

  Culture puts blinders on people and we say things like, “Well, honey, that’s just the way we do things in the South. It’s just better for the races to be separate,” Sr. Helen says.10 The privileged whites never questioned the rules because they had no experience of the suffering on the other side.

  Something within her shifted during Neal’s talk. Sister Helen likened it to the apostles at Pentecost. It was a real transformation that led her to act. She felt she couldn’t do anything else.

  After Dead Man Walking was released, Sr. Helen had the chance to thank Sr. Maria Augusta Neal for the talk she gave that converted her heart to the Gospel of social justice. Neal was “a steadfast prophet,” Sr. Helen says, and woke her up to the needs of the poor.

  Neal received a doctorate in sociology from Harvard in 1963 and chaired the sociology department at Emmanuel College, a Boston women’s college run by her religious community. She was best known for conducting the National Sisters Survey, which charted change among US Catholic women religious after the Second Vatican Council. She published books on the state of religious life for women and conducted many studies on the state of the poor in the world, calling Catholics to close the gap between theology and poverty. She died in 2004 at the age of eighty-two.

  “She taught the students all those years that the poor have a right to reach up for what is rightfully theirs. But on the other side of the equation are those of us who have been privileged who also have an obligation to be in solidarity with poor people and to share all of the suffering we’ve both been given,” Sr. Helen says. “I hold her up as a true woman of the Gospel who stayed faithful and taught so many of us. Her work in sociology gave her first-hand knowledge of what was [happening] on the ground. I was never on the ground. I was always with privileged people. I was doing religious education and all that good stuff but I wasn’t grounded in the suffering of people so I didn’t feel compassion
or passion to change things.”11

  Not long after Neal’s talk to her community, in 1981 at age forty-one, Sr. Helen moved in with a few of her fellow sisters in the St. Thomas Housing Project, which at the time was the most dangerous housing project in New Orleans. They worked at Hope House, a social service agency in the projects that offered adult education classes, recreational programs, a food pantry, and homeless shelter.

  Back in Baton Rouge, Sr. Helen’s mother was “scared to death” for her daughter moving into “the Projects.” For decades, the US government subsidized housing for the poor by building high-rise apartments in urban areas, which quickly became known as the Projects, a term originally ascribed to development projects. Constructed in clusters, these buildings quickly became areas of rampant violence and home to gangs, drug dealers, and addicts. The most notorious of the Projects was Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Illinois.

  In one of her first days living in St. Thomas, bullets flew through the windows and tore apart one sister’s dress hanging in the closet. Because of that, Sr. Helen’s mother prayed daily at Mass for her daughter’s safety. Women at St. Thomas More Parish, where her mother attended daily Mass, knew what ministry Sr. Helen was in by her mother’s petitions during the Prayers of the Faithful. (This is a time during the Mass when the community offers up specific prayer intentions.) Gusta Mae Prejean regularly prayed for her daughter working in the “ghetto.”

  While her family didn’t visit often, once Sr. Helen’s mother summoned up the courage to visit her daughter for the weekend. Her mother overcame her fear of the place because she met the people. Those who don’t live in these settings hear news reports and assume the worst, but when they go there and meet the people living there they see the humanity, Sr. Helen says. “There was violence there, but when you meet the people it’s just different. You’re there and you’re in it with them.”12