wfn.org | In the steps of Helen Prejean

[BethAH@mbm.org]

March 14, 2001
Beth Hawn
Mennonite Board of Missions
(219) 294-7523
<NEWS@MBM.org>

In the steps of Helen Prejean: toward a death penalty moratorium

Grant Rissler is serving through Mennonite Voluntary Service as a
writer and photographer.  After spending a year as intern at the
Mennonite Central Committee United Nations office in Manhattan,
he is traveling for five months by bus to 20 other MVS and
Short-Term Mission sites, gathering the stories and experiences
of other volunteers and communities.  A weekly column by Grant
can be found on the web at www.MBM.org.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (CHM/MBM) – When former Service Adventure
participant Claire Gisel joined the Mennonite Central Committee
unit in New Orleans in 1998, she moved into the St. Thomas
neighborhood, arguably the single poorest neighborhood in the
United States.

She also moved into the circle of lives that touched and were
touched by Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun whose ministry
to death-row inmates and murder victims’ families inspired the
Academy Award-winning movie “Dead Man Walking.”

The two, a woman’s campaign and a neighborhood, have been
continuing threads of support and challenge that run through her
life, said Gisel.  Those threads have sustained her through two
years of service, and guided her to work with Prejean on an
anti-death penalty effort known as Moratorium 2000.

“When I first came to New Orleans,” Gisel said, “it seemed that
everybody was involved with the death penalty.  It was not
something I ever came face-to-face with growing up.  Here, it
just seemed to be an omnipresent evil.  [I was] around people
that had family on death row, around family of people who had
been killed, around the [community] attorney for everyone, the
killer and the killed.”

Still, the death penalty was only one issue Gisel had to come to
terms with.  “Poverty, racism, hunger.  All of them were things I
saw every day.”

The strength to push on in the face of the injustice, Gisel said,
often came from those who had walked before her, in particular,
Prejean.

“I remember reading her book after I came to St. Thomas,” Gisel
said.  “In it she talks about when she first moved into St.
Thomas, two blocks from where I now lived.  It sounded like she
was writing out of my journal:  the fear from hearing gunshots
outside the house … asking ‘Will I make it?  Was this the right
choice?’ … and eventually building relationships with the people
you used to be afraid of.”

Before joining Moratorium 2000, Gisel worked for more than a year
with the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, an organization
dedicated to pushing for better wages and work conditions.
Gisel’s work was based out of Hope House, where Prejean began her
efforts in St. Thomas.

“I was actually in the same office she and Bart (a community
attorney who works on death row cases) worked in,” she said.  “I
came into that office afraid of it, intimidated by the ghosts
that were there.  Coming to terms with the fact that those ghosts
were part of my support was an important thing for me.  They were
just starting when they were in that office, too.”

As a reminder of that support, Gisel kept on the wall a Picasso
poster depicting Don Quixote that Prejean had placed there.

In the summer of 2000, as her interest in the issue of capital
punishment increased, Gisel began volunteering in the evenings
for Moratorium 2000, a campaign led by Prejean to obtain an
immediate moratorium on the death penalty.  In September, Gisel
had the opportunity to join the organization as its interfaith
coordinator.

“I wanted to be more involved in doing something [with the
moratorium],” Gisel said, “and then the opportunity opened up.
It was a blessing.”

Since September, Gisel has worked at contacting faith-based
groups and organizations like Pax Christi, asking them to help
the group reach its goal of obtaining one million U.S. signatures
supporting a moratorium on the death penalty.  The group already
has more than 3.2 million signatures worldwide.  But it’s not an
easy sell.

“It’s not a touchy-feely subject,” Gisel said. “There aren’t a
lot of photo opportunities.  We’re not feeding hungry children.

“One of the things I’ve struggled with is ways to get Mennonites
involved,” she said.  “There’s a hesitancy I can’t quite
understand.  I just assumed that the Mennonite Church, a peace
church, would be an automatic fit, but there are other
denominations that are so much easier. I’m sure there would be a
lot of people who would like to be involved, but I’m not sure how
to [reach] them.”

There have been some recent, exciting victories, Gisel said,
citing the Illinois moratorium declared by Republican Governor
George Ryan after evidence came to the fore indicating that an
innocent person was scheduled to be executed.  But there have
also been setbacks where death penalty legislation has been
expanded, especially in Virginia.

“I am hopeful, though,” Gisel said.  “I just don’t see how we can
continue to profess being a world leader when we’re the only
Western country that has the death penalty, and in direct
violation of human-rights treaties we’ve signed [but never
ratified, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child].”

Gisel said that despite the challenges, she continues to be
inspired by Prejean and other people she meets through the Murder
Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, a group who have all had
relatives killed, but who oppose the death penalty.

She has learned much, she said, from “hearing those stories of
people whose children and siblings and parents have been killed,
and sensing the calm of that group, even in the midst of their
daily pain.

“It’s become so cliché to say this,” Gisel said.  “You go into
service to help people, but you come away with so much more than
you give.”

More information, and an opportunity to sign the Moratorium 2000
petition, is available at www.moratorium2000.org.

Mennonite Voluntary Service and Service Adventure are joint
programs of the Commission on Home Ministries of the General
Conference Mennonite Church and Mennonite Board of Missions of
the Mennonite Church.

Mennonite Central Committee is the relief and service
organization of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in
North America.

* * *

Grant E. Rissler       PHOTOS AVAILABLE