Meet the nuns of Texas’s death row

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sisters of Mary Morning Star is a group of Catholic nuns who work with women on Texas’ death row. New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright joins guest host Courtney Collins to discuss the deep bonds the sisters have with condemned inmates, what it says about faith and friendship, and how they view the death penalty as law. His article is “The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2020, a group of young woman found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
0:06.9	Someone was posting photos.
0:09.2	It was just me naked.
0:10.6	Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.
0:14.3	This is Levitown, a new podcast from IHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Collidercope,
0:19.3	about the rise of deep fate pornography and the battle to
0:22.2	stop it. Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the IHeartRadio app,
0:28.2	Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The women on death row at the Patrick L. O'Daniel unit in Gatesville, Texas, don't have a lot of choice about how they fill their days.
0:47.1	They work if they can. They eat in their cells, except on rare occasions. Their time outside is extremely limited.
0:54.1	Even common room television viewing
0:55.6	is restricted. But over the last several years, a bond with a group of nuns who live nearby
1:01.0	has given many of them a renewed point of view and sense of community. From KERA and Dallas,
1:06.8	this is Think. I'm Courtney Collins in for Chris Boyd. This surprising relationship between
1:12.3	women living on death row and the Sisters of Mary Morningstar is the focus of a piece in the
1:17.8	New Yorker written by Lawrence Wright. It's called Sisterhood, a remarkable alliance between
1:23.2	an order of Catholic nuns and the women on Texas's death row. And he joins us now to talk about it.
1:28.9	Larry, welcome back to think. Thank you, Courtney. It's good to be with you again.
1:32.9	So I'm really interested about what inspired you to write this piece.
1:38.8	I was walking with a friend and she said her mom who is in Catholic prison ministries, sometimes goes to
1:48.1	death row in Gatesville, Texas. And recently, these nuns have started to visit the women on
1:54.2	death row. And I thought, wow, that's not something I ever heard about. And so I explored it a little more. And it turned out
2:03.7	there was this Catholic deacon named Ronnie Lastovica, who lives in Belton, Texas. And part of his
	...

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