Faith Primer

Ronnie Lastovica was a retired cattleman, now Catholic deacon, who ministered to women on death row in Gatesville, Texas. He wasn’t their attorney, rather “his assignment” was to help them live until they were sentenced to die. As he ministered to a group of women at the prison, he noticed “they didn’t know how to get along. “They were like feral cats.” Deacon Ronnie proposed to a contemplative community of young nuns, Sisters of Mary Morning Star, whose convent was not far from Gatesville, that they visit the women.  As Lawrence Wright recounts in the February 10, 2025 article in the New Yorker entitled “The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row:”: 

Sister Lydia Maria’s eyes “got really big,” Ronnie told me. “We don’t go to prisons,” she said firmly, although she offered to pray for the women, and kindly asked for their names. Prayer was what the order was created to do. Ronnie stayed in his seat, expounding on how great his idea was. The condemned women were struggling spiritually, and there was a limit to how much guidance a man could offer them. He pointed out that the nuns lived very similar lives—by choice. What could be more perfect?
Sister Lydia Maria said that she’d have to ask permission of the order’s leadership, who’d likely not allow contemplative nuns to traipse off to death row.

“But would you pray on it?” Ronnie asked as he was escorted to the door.

The nuns prayed, and then they deliberated as a group, which was unusual in a vocation where silence is the rule…The vicar believed in “providential encounters,” such as the serendipitous knock on the door from Deacon Ronnie. “I’m very edified by him,” Sister Mary Thomas told me later. “He’s a holy man. He makes the walls fall to serve these women.” She and the sisters in the convent were all unnerved by the prospect of visiting death row, but they also felt compelled to answer Ronnie’s plea. Sister Lydia Maria told him, “We will meet these ladies and discuss our way of life. If it helps them, that’s wonderful. But that’s all this will be, nothing else.” Despite there being only six women on death row when the nuns first visited (a seventh, Taylor Parker, arrived in 2022), Ronnie observed that there were cliques and hard feelings among them, which made prison life even more miserable than it had to be. He’d noticed on other wards that female prisoners needed community in a way that men typically didn’t, and they often formed family-like units. Yet, because the condemned women inhabited a place of spiritual darkness, they could fall into spats and backbiting. If they were a family, they were a broken one.

Four nuns arrived at the O’Daniel Unit on December 2, 2021, two months after Deacon Ronnie visited their convent. He met them in the parking lot. “They were so nervous, they were just shaking,” he recalled. “They looked like little ducks walking.” The nuns were escorted through a barred double gate and into a security office. They presented their driver’s licenses, which bore their secular birth names, not the names they’d been given by the order. Having taken a vow of poverty, they owned virtually nothing, so there was little to scan except the beaded rosaries that looped around their belts and dangled to their knees. They passed through another gate and arrived in the common room, where the condemned women awaited them.“We didn’t know what to expect,” Sister Lydia Maria recalled of the initial prison visit. The nuns, in their gray habits, found the women dressed all in white. Deacon Ronnie said words of introduction. “Then something supernatural happened,” Brittany recalled. “It was just instant. There wasn’t a moment of discomfort. There wasn’t a moment of unease. We opened our arms and they opened their arms, and we embraced one another. Both groups were surprised that they had so much in common. The condemned women were astonished that the nuns had chosen to live a life nearly as confined as their own, in rooms that they, too, called “cells.” Brittany said, “We talked about having a corner. I have a corner in my cell where I pray and spend time with God. And they explained that they have their own sanctuaries in their cells.” Sister Lydia Maria privately noted another connection: “We are not what the world would call beautiful women. We always wear the same clothes. The prisoners cannot be afraid of us. They cannot feel lower than us. There’s nothing in our appearance to make them feel not beautiful or not elegant.” That initial visit lead to many more as a deep friendship blossomed between the inmates and the nuns.

To read more, please see the full article here