Sr. Helen Prejean at St. Bona's

It was following the 1984 killing of Patrick Sonnier in Louisiana’s electric chair that Sr. Helen Prejean’s mission was born — to take people on the spiritual journey she had taken so they could be brought face to face with the death penalty in America. Sr. Helen, a native of Louisiana, is known internationally for her tireless work against the death penalty. She was instrumental in sparking national dialogue on the issue and in shaping the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to all state executions.

St. Bonaventure University will welcome Sr. Helen to campus Tuesday, Nov. 11, for a public lecture. The university’s Franciscan Center for Social Concern is sponsoring the program, “Dead Man Walking: The Journey Continues,” which begins at 7 p.m. in the Reilly Center Arena. The event is free and open to the public.

Sr. Helen is a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph. She spent her first 24 years with the Sisters teaching religion to junior high school students and working within her community, first as religious education director and then as formation director. At the age of 40, she realized that being on the side of poor people was an essential part of the Gospel. She moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans and began working at Hope House, a center that assists public housing residents.

During this time, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate. She agreed, and so began a new journey. In 1982, she started visiting Patrick Sonnier in Louisiana’s Angola Prison. She became his spiritual adviser, worked to prevent his execution, and finally, walked with him to the electric chair. She did the same thing with a second prisoner, Robert Willie. Concerned with the plight of murder victims’ families she founded “Survive,” which provides counseling and support for grieving families.

And then she sat down and wrote a book about the experience. The result was “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States,” which Random House published in 1993. The book became a best-seller, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and spawned an Oscar-winning movie and an internationally acclaimed opera. Tim Robbins has made it into a play that is being performed by high school and college students across the country.

Since 1984, Sr. Helen has divided her time between campaigning against the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied six more men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some of those executed were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book, “The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions,” which was released in 2004.

Sr. Helen lives in New Orleans and works with the Death Penalty Discourse Center, the Moratorium Campaign and the Dead Man Walking Play Project. She is presently at work on another book — “River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey to Death Row.”

SBU Theater will open its fall season this week with the stage version of “Dead Man Walking,” which will run at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 5-8 in The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. An audience talkback session will be held after the Thursday, Nov. 6, performance.

Tickets for the theater production of “Dead Man Walking” are available by calling the Quick Center for the Arts Box Office at (716) 375-2494. The play contains adult subjects and language.