Peter Costello
Sr Helen Prejean with Pope Francis 
River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey
Sister Helen Prejean (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
Helen Prejean is the well known author of that massive success as book, film, and even opera, Dead Man Walking (1993). She is one of the most powerful advocates for the abolition of the death penalty, not just in the US, but everywhere. The abolition of the death penalty she rightly sees as a leading “pro-life” issue, but very often it is not. Her point is that respect for human life has greater dimension than many people will accept.
More than that she now realised that a significant number of those executed had been wrongly convicted in the first place. As a result she wrote The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions (2004), another important book.
Here in her new book, Helen Prejean tells her own life story and relates just what happened in her life that has brought her to where she stands today, and how her faith and her spirituality are dedicated to a deep sense of service to others.
This book is an apologia pro vita sua, a justification of the Faith she finds within her. It is (to echo St John Henry Newman again) “an account of her religious opinions” since her adolescence. As such it is never less than an engaging and dynamic read, filled with interest to all who recall or would want to know about how the Church was changed by Vatican II. But it becomes stronger and more intense as it reaches the present day, as she finds the earlier turmoil’s of Faith and feeling are settled, and the last chapters are the most deeply affecting of all. In these she finds herself increasingly engaged with the need to work for social justice as a necessary foundation for Faith. Jesus, she believes, calls us every day to see justice is done for all.
Helen Prejean comes from a Catholic family of Louisiana – a state whose French heritage belies the claims so often made about what it is to be an American. This background is very different to the Irish-American background to Catholicism we are too accustomed to have in mind here in Ireland; it reminds us that there were more ways of being Catholic than the Irish way.
The first part of the book deals with her life as a novice nun, and what that meant in the 1950s and 60s. She was assigned to work as a teacher and this opened up her experience, but she later realised she was very limited in the sort of students she taught at her Catholic schools: few Black people came her way.
From the Deep South she moved north into Canada to London Ontario – and thus part of her formation was outside the culture of the modern US.
The last two parts of her book, though they emerge seamlessly from her earlier years, reveal her state of life and belief in the post Vatican decades. She was one of these nuns who took the Council at its word, and worked for a new vision of what it meant to be a Catholic Christian. For her, Jesus became more than words on a page, but a living person, a friend rather than a distant figure of piety.
As I say, the last three chapters of this book are the most powerful, for in them she becomes fully aware of how great is the injustice in the culture she has grown up in. She embraced actively the option for the poor.
Do not wait for the paperback next year. Buy this book now. It may well change your life”
On the way she encountered many great difficulties: the most emotionally bemusing was her relationship with a Catholic priest, which he wanted to move onto a more highly charged level, leading to them both leaving their orders. This, though it pained her, she resisted. She preserved her female integrity, and put that integrity to work for others.
A review of this kind of book, which is so deeply moving, cannot really do more than urge readers to follow her path vicariously with her, as she has described it far better than a mere critical summary can achieve.
Do not wait for the paperback next year. Buy this book now. It may well change your life, whatever age you are. This is a classic of the future, read it now.
