Sublime Sisterhood

It has been more than ten years since a deacon by the name of Ronnie Lastovica was first asked to bring Holy Communion to a woman awaiting execution on Death Row in a Texas prison. Her name was Linda Carty, age fifty-six, who, having spent a dozen years already under sentence of death, was running out of time. Deacon Ronnie agreed to return, and so, week after week, he would minister to her. Not long after the visits began, she told him about another woman who had asked to see him. Pretty soon there would be four more for Deacon Ronnie to see, bringing the number to an even six.

Not only were these women living under the shadow of imminent death, but they were forced to do it together, spending their last days with people they had neither chosen to live with nor were particularly able to get along with. If Hell is other people, to quote one of the most deeply depressing lines ever spoken on the stage (from a dismal play by Jean-Paul Sartre called No Exit), these women were certainly living it. “They were like feral cats,” Deacon Ronnie told a journalist by the name of Lawrence Wright, a staff reporter for The New Yorker, who was covering the story. If Hell is other people, to quote one of the most deeply depressing lines ever spoken on the stage (from a dismal play by Jean-Paul Sartre called No Exit), these women were certainly living it.Tweet This

It was at that very moment, however, that a sunburst suddenly occurred to Deacon Ronnie. Practically down the street from the prison where the women were housed, there was a monastery with a handful of contemplative nuns living a life of uninterrupted prayer, work, and silence. All of which was about to be most wonderfully upended owing to the importunities of one very persuasive man—plus, of course, the Holy Ghost, whom the good sisters could hardly refuse.  

What Deacon Ronnie proposed was that they actually step outside their own walls from time to time, in order to enter through a very different set of walls for the sake of seeing six condemned prisoners living in the same neighborhood. He was not asking that they cease being contemplatives; nor was he asking them to forsake the fastness of the monastery. He was only suggesting that they agree to an assignment, admittedly unusual, to provide occasional solace for these women whose lives were about to end. Could they, perhaps, see it as a sort of apostolic extension to their own religious vocation, which was a life of prayer and solitude consecrated to God?  

How can we be of service to these women? That was the question they put to themselves. Besides praying for them, of course, which was a skill set they had long exercised already and were now happy to apply to the inmates down the street. And so they thought and thought about it, praying to know if it was God’s will that they do more, that they actually take on this unprecedented job, this corporal work of mercy that God might now be asking of them.

They said yes, and so the visits began.  

And straightaway the miracles began to happen. They instantly realized that a connection had been made, a movement of grace felt. “There wasn’t a moment of discomfort,” said one of the inmates after that initial visit. “There wasn’t a moment of unease. We opened our arms, and we embraced each other.”  

They had, after all, a few things in common already. In fact, it was a continual astonishment to the inmates that the nuns, while not incarcerated for crimes committed, had nevertheless chosen to live in confined spaces—which they, too, called cells—not much larger than the ones in which they were forced to live. Or that they dressed in a way every bit as stark and unvaried as the prison uniforms they wore. Or that between the two groups of women there could not possibly be any invidious comparison as to which was more beautiful. “The prisoners cannot be afraid of us,” commented one of the nuns. “We are not what the world would call beautiful women…. There’s nothing in our appearance to make them feel not beautiful or not elegant.”  

But, at the deepest level, what drew each of them to the other, the glue that made the connection stick, was the realization that they were children of the same God, daughters of a loving Father, who, for all that they had abused and betrayed—and, yes, even murdered His children—would always be there for them, to heal and forgive their sins. And not, heaven knows, the sins of the inmates alone, which is what put them in prison in the first place, but all our sins, including those of the nuns, which may have been no less scarlet in the eyes of God. The mystery of iniquity has not only infected inmates on Death Row; it has insinuated its poison into an entire fallen race. In Adam’s fall we sinned all.

And, yet, the redemptive reach of Jesus Christ is far wider than we know, reaching across all barriers of time and space. Only an obdurate heart can impede its work. “The Lord’s love is greater than all our problems, frailties, and flaws,” Pope Francis writes in Christus Vivit. How could it be otherwise with a God who delights to embrace all the prodigal sons and daughters of the world? Who is always eager to embrace us after every fall into sin? “Because the worst fall, and pay attention to this,” he adds, “the worst fall, the one that can ruin our lives, is when we stay down and do not allow ourselves to be helped up.” 

It is because the nuns knew this—not just as a piece of catechesis torn from a copybook but as the really Good News Christ came to tell us—that they became so convicted by what they knew that they simply had to become emissaries of divine love, determined to share that love with women whose own lives revealed so little of it. To show them that before God we are all poor sinners, begging our Father in Heaven to give us a share in His mercy. And that this mercy bears a unique and unrepeatable name: Jesus the Christ, who suffers us all to break Him upon the wheel of an unjust world. “His self-sacrifice on the Cross is so great,” says the pope, “that we can never repay it, but only receive it with immense gratitude and with the joy of being more greatly loved than we could ever imagine: ‘He loved us first’ (1 John 4:19).” 

And so into that place of spiritual darkness where six condemned souls await their fate, Christ has come—not only to assure them of salvation on the other side but to be the mainstay of their lives until that moment comes when, all the judicial appeals having run their course, they will stand face-to-face with death itself. But they will not be alone.