Dominican Sister of Peace Susan Olson, OP, a Professor of Music at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT, recently had a unique opportunity to reunite with old students and friends and take part in a powerful performance.

Considering Matthew Shepard is an oratorio written by Craig Hella Johnson in 2012. The piece, which runs about 90 minutes and is akin to an operatic performance, tells the story of Shepard’s murder in 1998.

Shepard’s death –believed to have been motivated by his homosexuality – eventually spurred hate crime legislation that added sexual orientation as a protected class in 2009.

“I was just out of graduate school when all of that happened,” Sr. Susan said. “I had just begun my teaching career. It was at a time, late 1990s, when the world was not very welcoming to the LGBTQIA community. So, you heard about this horrible thing that happened, but then it was gone.”

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Sr. Susan and Rob Mikulski – her friend and former colleague at the University of Texas-San Antonio (UTSA) – had discussed putting together a performance of the oratorio. As with many pre-2020 plans, it was tabled. But in 2024, the idea resurfaced and centered around one question:

“Do you think we can pull this off?”

“This performance takes a really special group of people that can sing a wide variety of music,” Sr. Susan said. “It’s very cohesive. It doesn’t stop; it goes from one piece to the next to the next.”

That special group of 32 vocalists and eight instrumentalists even included some of Sr. Susan’s former students she taught at UTSA.

“To be a part of something that allowed me to offer empathy and also encourage empathy in others was really, really powerful,” Sr. Susan said. “And being able to sing with former students? It was really special.”

The oratorio is mostly classical, but also features gospel, country, pop, and even yodeling to open and close the performance. Considering Matthew Shepherd takes place on the plains of Wyoming where Shepard was beaten and left to die, tied to a fence.

The fence was anthropomorphized at different points of the story. Sr. Susan performed the part of the fence after Matthew’s death, at a time in which people would visit the site of the murder and lay down flowers, photos, candles, and pay tribute in other ways.

“I don’t mind,” the fence, in part, says during the performance. “Being a shrine is better than being the scene of a crime.”

“When I started rehearsing it, I would actually sit and just cry because I was so moved by it,” Sr. Susan said. “Being the fence, that was very moving.”

Performing the oratorio at Zion Lutheran Church in San Antonio, where Mikulski is the director of music ministries, was a unique and perhaps unexpected venue for the subject matter. But Sr. Susan saw it as an opportunity to share a moving and challenging story.

“(Mikulski) and I have talked very much about Catholic Social Teaching and the inherent dignity of every human person and how important that is,” she said. “We were very clear about the fact that we didn’t want to force anyone to change their mind. What we wanted was to open them up to consider, think about Matthew’s story.”

Nearly 30 years after Shepard was murdered, Sr. Susan says the need for people to hear a piece like Considering Matthew Shepard remains important – especially as younger generations may not know his story.

“Music is so empathic naturally,” she said. “Music is meant to make you feel. To put a story like this, or any hard story, to words can help you learn about and touch into someone else’s experience in some small way.”

Stories of hate crimes against the LGBTQIA community remain prominent today. In 2024, hate crimes based on sexual orientation made up 17% of all hate crimes in the U.S., according to FBI data. Nearly half of the hate crimes based on sexual orientation targeted gay men. Since their founding in 2009, the Dominican Sisters of Peace have been committed to standing with marginalized groups and eradicating exclusion and injustice.

“I think in our current climate, it is imperative that we continue to raise Catholic Social Teaching and the belief in the dignity of every human person,” Sr. Susan said. “Human dignity is being throttled at every turn. We need to be the ones to speak. Who will speak if we don’t?”