Originally published at crisis magazine
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
