The Rev. Greg Morgan offers one in a series of articles on contemporary trends in America for people of faith.
“Here Am I. Send me.” (Isaiah 6:8)
The story of a vocational deacon with a broad commitment to discipleship who brought together a small group of reluctant nuns and five women on death row and wrought a minor miracle.
{from Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, Feb. 17 & 24, 2025, “Sisterhood: A remarkable alliance between an order of Catholic nuns and the women on Texas’ death row.”}
At the prison in Gatesville, Texas, there are six correctional units one of which houses a small group of women on death row. A writer from The New Yorker visited the inmates recently and then produced a report on their encounter with a cattleman serving as an ordained Roman Catholic deacon and a small group of nuns. As a result of that meeting, an unusual alliance of the reluctant and the condemned was formed which resulted in unexpected outcomes. The nuns were part of a new order, The Sisters of the Morning Star, whose focus was limited to prayer in the silent company of the other initiates, contemplation, study and work, although as a new order they were still defining their role in the church. The condemned prisoners, by contrast, were struggling spiritually, and there was a limit to what men could offer them by way of guidance. As women, they shared a need for community in a way that men typically did not. All were in the process of seeking appeals from their death sentences which frequently take years to resolve.
Nuns have gotten very scarce in recent times; their numbers have declined by 80% in the past half-century and those who remain are quite elderly. By contrast, the Sisters of the Morning Star have an average age of 38; as a new order, the sisters share an unusually strong faith and an active commitment to Christian service. A Catholic deacon named Ronnie Lastovica, received as his first assignment the job of working with the prisoners at Gatesville. There he met Linda Carty who had been convicted of murder but had been on death row for 12 years to allow for the appeal process to take place. The more he learned about the prisoners, the more he saw similarity in the kinds of constricted lives both they and the nuns led. A meeting between the two groups, then, seemed to him to be an event that was destined to occur, and he was the logical one to arrange it.
That is, of course, precisely what took place, and that get-together segued into one of those serendipitous events in life that lack a clear rationale but are nonetheless meaningful beyond anyone’s expectations. The two groups of women came together in 2021 through the intervention of Deacon Ronnie. The prisoners didn’t know what to expect but later admitted that after the introductions, “something supernatural occurred.” They later recalled that it was “just an instant.” But there was something very unusual about the meeting: “there wasn’t a moment of discomfort. There wasn’t a moment of unease. We opened our arms and they opened theirs, and we embraced one another.” One prisoner said “It was like we had known them all our lives. There was no hesitation. We hugged and immediately started talking.” One of the sisters later said of the visit “We came here so afraid and thinking we were going to minister to these women. And, oh goodness, they ministered to us. It was the most captivating moment I’ve ever had.”
Both groups were surprised that they had so much in common. The sisters soon learned about the kinds of lives the condemned women had led prior to the crime that led to their incarceration. In all instances, this information was more revealing than any of them could have guessed; its brutal reality was shocking, particularly in that the women knew little about one another, much less people from a wholly different background, so that they shared a kind of “forced naϊveté”. Whether or not that background information had ever come to light in the course of the trial that followed for each of them, it was clear that what the sisters learned had immediate relevance for them in assessing the justice of the verdicts. It was essential information. A couple of examples should suffice to portray the reality of what these women had survived prior to the crime itself.
Brittany, who had entered death row in 1998, had been born addicted to heroin because her mother was an addict. During her childhood, her birth father was jailed on drug charges. At the age of three, her mother married; the resulting bond was marred by years of tumultuous relations which resulted in divorce and re-marrying at least four times while living in a drugged haze. At age four, she was molested by a babysitter; her parents were offering her drugs when she was ten. Her favorite aunt was murdered by her husband. Her father took them to the morgue to identify the body, but they were only shown a photo which haunted her for years. Her stepfather then took her to her aunt’s apartment to clean. She later recalled that he sobbed as they cleaned the blood-soaked carpet. At 15, she admitted to her mom that he had been sexually abusing her for years. Her mother said that that was OK because she’d had sex with him as well. In high school a knee injury led to Brittany becoming addicted to painkillers; she began taking as many as 100 a day. Once she had overcome her addiction, she needed to find a new way to support herself. Prostitution, she felt, held the best prospect for a steady income. This re-introduced her to drugs. When, upon returning home one day she discovered her daughter sitting in the middle of the bed staring at a TV screen filled only with static, she concluded that she needed to remove her from that toxic environment, so she contacted her ex-boyfriend who came, picked her up, and took her away to live in a healthier setting. As she recovered from being gang-raped, beaten and stabbed, she recalled thinking that this was perhaps all that she deserved because she was so broken.
Melissa was convicted of the murder of her little girl. Her background resembled that of many other women in a similar circumstance who’d been convicted of violent crimes. She had been abused, chronically impoverished, sometimes homeless and a cocaine addict. She temporarily lost custody of several of her children. A medical examiner later reported that the abuse she had suffered was the worst he had ever encountered. The fact that she was pigeon-toed and frequently fell was never submitted as evidence in her trial; nor was testimony entered into her record indicating that she had never abused her children and that her health had declined abruptly after tumbling from a rickety outdoor staircase. The D.A. who prosecuted Melissa was subsequently convicted of bribery, extortion, racketeering, offering favorable treatment to a drug cartel and selling reduced sentences. Sabrina Van Tassel, a documentarian, interviewed Melissa after she was unshackled and strip-searched. When asked why she had not sought medical treatment; Melissa replied that she had recently regained custody of her children and was worried that the county might permanently remove them from the home. Van Tassel left the interview convinced that Melissa hadn’t committed the crime for which she’d been jailed. The appellate attorney added that she had known Melissa was innocent for ten years and was simply waiting until the press got interested.
In the appeals process, delays are a fact of life. It is terribly difficult to reverse a death-penalty conviction, in part out of “reluctance to question a jury verdict.” The burden of proof shifts to the defendant. The defense attorneys are required to establish overwhelming innocence or constitutional violations rather than reasonable doubt about guilt. When the appeal fails to be upheld, the district attorney requests a death warrant, the process toward execution resumes, and “the machinery of death then moves swiftly.” When a prisoner is informed that a date has been given for the execution, the usual reaction is shock and a sense of betrayal. One is quoted as saying “it was like being pierced in the heart.” Nevertheless, her compatriots supported her and offered emotional protection at a fraught moment. In some ways, an observer would have witnessed “the family dynamic” which had been established among the women no matter how much time remained for each of them. Frequently, accompanying this response to the news of an upcoming execution, the women shared in a monastic ritual called the Chapter of Faults. It helps to harmonize the group. As each woman admits to personal failures, the participants demonstrate “the humility required for communal living.” Sometimes, “hanging over the event is an unstated parallel between the fate of the women and that of Jesus.”
On their third visit to the prison in Gatesville, the sisters decided to make a radical offer to the prisoners — to offer them the opportunity to serve as oblates in the order. Oblates are lay people who support the work of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star primarily through prayer. They explained to the women that becoming an oblate represented the chance to follow a path toward a ‘sanctified life.’ One by one, the women agreed to do this. This was partly a political act, because the nuns imagined that Governor Greg Abbott, a Roman Catholic, would hesitate to condemn women who were so closely allied with an officially recognized order of Catholic nuns. However, whatever the outcome of that effort, the sisters concurred that these women were in such a radical state, facing 15, 20, 30 years some of them, and they needed to live in a way that could “be sanctified and have meaning.”
The first woman executed in Texas was an enslaved person convicted of killing the slaveholder with an axe in 1853. Another woman was hanged in 1863 under a conviction of robbing and murdering a horse trader transporting gold. Then, for 130 years no more women were executed in Texas. Executions of women resumed after the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for states to proceed with the practice in1976. Under George W. Bush’s tenure as Governor,152 executions were approved.
Those who are executed tend to be from disadvantaged groups. In commenting on a recent execution, one of the women remarked that “she didn’t get a chance because she was black. She was poor. She was gay. She was a former gang member.” In the New Yorker story, there is only one example of a prisoner on death row receiving a stay of execution. When she asked the Republican state representative who contacted her to explain what a stay signified, he answered, “it means you’re going to wake up on Thursday morning.” Nearly ¾ of the 168 men on Texas’ death row are Black or Hispanic. But the biggest factor that comes into play is social class. Poverty makes it almost inevitable that the accused will have a court-appointed defense attorney. Only one of the residents at the prison in Gatesville was able to afford a private defense attorney. This is significant because the women all knew that the court-appointed attorney for the other prisoners “had failed to get even one of his three dozen capital clients acquitted.”
The Catholic church for a very long time held that the civil power to execute people superseded the Sixth Commandment,” but by the 20th century the church began to rethink its teaching, in part to be consistent with its existing strong opposition to abortion. In 2018, Pope Francis revised the catechism declaring that the death penalty was an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person in question. He later published an encyclical calling on all Catholics to advocate for an end to the death penalty.
The writer was invited at one point to attend a special service for the condemned prisoners which was held at the prison. At that time, some of the inmates offered commentary on their situations. One woman, age 50, had been incarcerated for 31 years, but she was still dealing with traumas from her childhood. “I’ve been in a state of survival my whole life,” she said. Like several other prisoners, those traumas had damaged her brain; she had suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse, had been repeatedly threatened with a gun, and her mother had once attempted to strangle her, but none of this information was shared with the jury; the judge would not permit it to be admitted as testimony so that the prosecutor would be allowed to claim that there was ‘no proof’ she had ever been abused. The article’s author said that having learned the stories of the women, he had concluded that justice is “a board game in which risk and randomness {are} the dominant factors.”
One of the remaining inmates on death row at Gatesville is a woman named Erica who is charged with the brutal murder of a woman in Houston whom she robbed in 1993. Her daughter’s name is Kelly, and her brother’s name is John. Both have been deeply affected by the murder; each has found a personal way to deal with the tragedy. John was a football hero at L.S.U. and is a millionaire real-estate investor. His spiritual journey led him to found an organization called Bridges to Life which has reached 90,000 prisoners in more than 200 prisons nation-wide. The program demands that each member admit to the crime committed. John says that he believes people can change. He has seen them be released and do well once back in society and says “my journey went to another level. It’s more about forgiveness.” Kelly is a practicing psychologist in Houston and passes the site of the murder every day. Unlike John, she had no questions for Erica, saying she knows all she needs to know. In reflecting back upon the crime, Kelly says she doesn’t like the way the term “is used in a manipulative way to evoke emotional, impulsive, rash actions.” She prefers other words to “explain human behavior.” She feels we justify many things when we write someone off as evil. It affects how one feels about the death penalty. It is “overdone”, she says. When asked if she has forgiven Erica, she says she doesn’t feel the crime “is hers to forgive.” It happened to her, “but it wasn’t done to me.” She says no state has the moral authority to impose the death penalty. She believes if one fits the racial and class demographic of most Texas prisoners, that person will be convicted. Otherwise, you have a good chance of being exonerated.
Of the remaining inmates, only one currently lives with a stay of execution, but she is still in prison after nearly three years from the time when she was informed of the stay. For the others, time is running out. The warden permitted the women to create a garden which has been carved out of a stretch of the recreation yard between the cellblock and the fence. They are not permitted to keep what they grow because it is used to feed the prisoners, but the garden now extends to half an acre and produces a huge array of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. As one of the remaining death row inmates said of the garden, “it is so much more than a garden. It represents my promised land. In so many profound and beautiful ways this is what the Lord has shown me. In it, I see the ways he took my brokenness and nurtured it into something able to bring joy.”
And that is a fitting way to conclude the remarkable story of the unlikely alliance of death row inmates and Catholic nuns who were brought together through the work of a deacon bent on engaging these particular prisoners in restorative work in the company of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. That relationship did not bring freedom to the prisoners, but it provided comfort, compassion, and peace to a very troubled group of people whom life had treated very badly, very unfairly. If that restorative work produced examples of forgiveness, redemption and peace in the women involved in the program, it can certainly be regarded as having been a blessing which touched the lives of a group of strangers in a transformative way.
Greg+