From Beverly Hills to a Mexican Prison

As experiences go, they don't come much more life-changing than this one.

You go from a Beverly Hills upbringing through two marriages and seven children, to living – voluntarily – in a Mexican prison, serving the needs of inmates, becoming a nun and founding a religious order. It all happened to Mary Clarke, later known as Mother Antonia Brenner, and when she died last October obituaries told of a magical life of serenity lived among some of the world's most desperate criminals. With it all she was known as the Prison Angel, and few could have worn the honor as lightly as she.

How did it all happen? Mary Clarke was born in Los Angeles in 1926, grew up in Beverly Hills with movie stars like Cary Grant among her neighbors, had two marriages and two divorces that she rarely discussed, and raised four daughters and three sons. All the while she was deeply involved in charity work, and when a priest told her one day in 1965 that he was delivering medical supplies to La Mesa Penitentiary in nearby Tijuana, Mexico, she decided to go along. The trip would change her life forever.

“Something happened to me when I saw men behind bars,” she said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “When I left, I thought a lot about the men. When it was cold, I wondered if the men were warm; when it was raining, if they had shelter . . . When I returned to the prison to live, I felt as if I’d come home.”

That didn’t happen right away, although she began working with the inmates as a volunteer. In 1977, with her children grown, she moved to La Mesa, living as any other inmate would. She slept in a 10-by-10-foot cell in the women’s wing, eating prison food and lining up for morning roll calls. As Richard Marosi of the Times wrote: “She would walk freely among thieves and drug traffickers and murderers, smiling, touching cheeks and offering prayers.”

He also cited a 2002 interview in which she said, “They have to accept that they’re wrong. They have to see the consequences. They have to feel the agony. But I do love them dearly.”

Along the way Mother Antonia became known as “The Prison Angel,” which was also the title of a Christopher Award-winning book about her. In time – with the approval of the bishop of Tijuana – she established a religious community for older women, the Eudist Sisters of the 11th Hour. And she still found time for regular visits with her own family.

“We called her the Eveready battery,” said her daughter, Christina Brenner. “She wouldn’t stop. She was always going.”

In changing her own life, she also changed the lives of others. A Catholic News Service obituary quoted one of them, a former prisoner named Antonio Granillo who is now the director of a men’s shelter: “If it weren’t for Mother Antonia, I would have been dead in prison or discarded in the street because of drugs.”

It was left for Mother Antonia herself to write the final lines of her life story. “In 30 years there,” she said, “I haven’t met anyone that wasn’t worth everything I could give to them – even my life. I see the image and likeness of God in each and every one of them.”

(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Jerry Costello, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)

Background information:

The Christophers: Christopher Radio & Video

Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour: Biography of Mother Antonia Brenner