Why in the world is the USCCB Blog promoting Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ? Despite what good work she might have done involving the death penalty she is also involved in serious errors. She is not an example to parade on the USCCB blog.
At the Democratic National Convention in 2008 she spoke to an interfaith crowd saying:
She received nothing but a stony silence, however, when she questioned the basis of the biblical crucifixion story as a “projection of our violent society.”
“Is this a God?” Prejeans asked about the belief that God allowed his son, Jesus, to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. “Or is this an ogre?”
So much for St. Paul’s “we preach Christ crucified.”
The previous year in 2007, she had this to say:
(A)ccording to Sister Helen Prejean, author of the best-selling book Dead Man Walking, and internationally-renowned advocate against the death penalty, it is the Church’s doctrine on homosexuality that is sinful, as it fails to recognize “the full dignity of all human beings.”
Speaking on Sunday at the close of the symposium, Prejean noted that the first steps in denying and “removing” a human being is to declare them somehow “not quite human, not like how we are … to say that they’re ‘disordered’” – a reference to the language of the Vatican to describe the orientation of gay people. Such terminology, she said, fails to recognize the full dignity of all human beings and is the “greatest form of disrespect.”
Accordingly, “to not stand with LGBT people would be a sin,” declared Prejean to thunderous applause.
Prejean said that she is hopeful as she’s convinced that “people are waking and rising,” and that this will “change the Church.”
“When dialogue starts, the bread starts rising,” she said. “The yeast, the Holy Spirit, is in our hearts.”
In 2006 she was one of the signers of an ad in the New York Times that in part said “YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.” After being disinvited by Duluth Bishop Dennis Schnurr to be a keynote speaker at an education dinner she later clarified “I believe that all of life is sacred and must be protected, especially in the vulnerable stages at the beginning of life and its end.” Yet she still managed to sign this document while at the same time saying: “ I stand squarely within the framework of ”the seamless garment“ ethic of life.” A year after this in the July-August 1997 St. Catherine Review: Sister Prejean “will not take a stand against abortion.” She has also said if she got a chance to talk to President Obama it would only be about his support of the death penalty. She can find nothing else to chide him about.
13 comments
Umm, why is she a nun? For that matter, why does she bother to call herself Catholic? She disregards the Church’s teaching, and calls God an “ogre”. Sounds more like an enemy of the faith than someone who has consecrated herself for it.
Can you provide some primary sources here? Some of this is questionable, especially the first thing you quoted. Please provide the whole speech.
Also, it’s very hard to take her seriously when she chides the government for the death penalty and war, but she won’t speak badly of abortion. It seems like she’s happy to protect the lives of the guilty, and disregard the innocent. It discredits her message somewhat, methinks.
MP, start by googling Sr Helen Prejean abortion and you note the following:
http://www.all.org/article/index/id/ODQ2NA/
Then try this:
http://fidelityandaction.wordpress.com/sr-helen-prejean-dossier/
PEACE
Celebrating comfort over life seems like “ogre” behavior to me.
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The new death penalty position is not good either. You had the catechism admitting that the death penalty is valid but then stating that it is rarely necessary given modern penology. But you had Blessed John Paul II calling it “cruel” in 1999 in St. Louis. Which is it? Valid but unnecessary…or cruel? As Cardinal Dulles pointed out in First Things years ago, God gave the death penalty over 30 times in the Pentateuch. Did God give that which is cruel? The US Supreme Court stopped the death penalty from 1972 til 1976. Why did they resume it? They found from statistics that it does deter…not passion murders…but premeditated murders like contract killings, robbery murders etc.
During the Terry Schiavo case I emailed her to get her take on it. Her secretary emailed back that she was unavailable at that time. She never replied. But I caught a brief CNN item where the case was mentioned, whereupon she went into an incoherent, nasty partisan rant. She could have linked her crusade to the general problem of capricious legal homicide, and shared the moral high ground with other pro-life activists. And if not welcome, she could have held that high ground alone. Instead, she disgraced herself as a partisan hack, motivated more by a craven need for validation by the secular left than by the Gospel.
Did she say something in the article that was unorthodox? I didn’t see anything untoward.
I just read and wonderful book about Fr. David Link who ministers to prisoners in IL. He was one the Dean of the U of Notre Dame Law school and became a priest at the age of 71. He is SO inspiring. But Sr. Prejean wrote the preface. Due to that, I will not be writing a book review or recommending the book.
The woman is obviously full of herself, which often happens when one searches for fame rather than truth.
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Trojan houses all over the place. For more than fifty years, the Catholic Church and the Republican party have been under heavy attack from the left. Unable to dent the core beliefs with their outside attacks, they are now calling themselves moderate republicans and catholics for a free choice in their attempts to destroy from within, what they failed so miserably to destroy from without.