Heeding God’s Call
By Lauren F. Winner
The Prison Angel
Mother Antonia’s Journey From Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail
By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Penguin Press. 237 pp. $24.95
Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan did not expect to spend three years hanging out with a Roman Catholic sister. They stumbled over Mother Antonia while interviewing a woman who had once been incarcerated at Tijuana’s La Mesa prison. La Mesa didn't have much to recommend it. “The only good thing about that place was that Irish nun,” said the woman, referring to one who lived with the inmates, ministering to both their physical and spiritual needs, praying with them, defending them from vicious guards. Hmmm , thought the reporting duo: “We wrote ourselves a note: Find nun who lives in prison.” A few weeks later, Jordan and Sullivan, Pulitzer prize-winning journalists who made their names covering the Mexican justice system for The Washington Post, went to La Mesa and found Mother Antonia. After three years of observation and interviews, they responded to her astonishing life story with this richly reported biography.
Here’s how Mother Antonia’s work at La Mesa started: In 1950s California, divorcee Mary Clarke was on her second marriage, which was turning out no better than her first. Clarke loved mothering her brood of seven but “began to feel she should be contributing somehow to something larger. “She started to collect shoes and medicine to be sent to the poor in Korea. Her husband, who felt the piles of shoes were taking over his house and his life, was not thrilled, but Clarke kept on, earning a reputation in the world of philanthropy as a powerhouse, a dynamo.
A few years later, a priest friend brought Clarke to La Mesa. She was moved by the plight of the prisoners and began visiting regularly. Eventually her second husband left her (and her first husband, to whom she was still married in the eyes of the church, died, leaving her, canonically, a widow, free once again to receive Holy Communion). By the late 1970s, with her children grown and her calling clear, Mary moved to La Mesa, to give the rest of her life to serving the inmates. Sometimes guards and prisoners ask why she is there. Her response: “For the love of God and for the love of you all!” Now known as Mother Antonia, Clarke still lives in La Mesa. At age 77, she devotes each day to brutal murderers and drug lords and rapists.
She began by tending to prisoners’ immediate physical needs — she persuaded local bakers to donate bread to supplement the inadequate La Mesa rations; she found dentists to fix the smiles of inmates and ex-convicts. But she quickly moved beyond this palliative care and tackled the root of the problem: the Mexican justice system, which “is stacked against the poor,” locking up modern-day Valjeans, while letting embezzlers and other white-collar criminals with access to sharp and high-priced attorneys go free. Mother Antonia began to accompany inmates to court, where she beseeches and harangues, forcing the judges to acknowledge and defend the heavy punishments they mete out to the poor. One Tijuana judge says that Mother Antonia changed his sentencing structure, teaching him that class ought not affect the length of one’s stay in prison. (Indeed, “prison angel,“ which recalls “the angel in the house,“ that infantilizing description of Victorian housewives, is an oddly apolitical moniker for someone who combats the corrupt Mexican justice system on a daily basis.)
Jordan and Sullivan have delivered their characteristic hard-hitting reporting. However, this book is not primarily an exposé of corruption in Mexican courtrooms or abuse at the hands of Mexican prison guards. Rather, it offers a strong dose of inspiration: “In the end,” write Jordan and Sullivan, “this is the story of a woman who followed a dream later in life. . . . Especially since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and all that has followed, we think more people are looking for a way to do something to make the world a little warmer.” In fact, Mother Antonia now has assistants: sisters, many of them older women who were turned away by other religious communities because of their age. One woman, Sister Elizabeth, is a widowed mother of five grown children who sold her house in Goldsboro, N.C., and moved to Tijuana to serve under Mother Antonia’s leadership. Sister Elizabeth, who works primarily at Tijuana’s hospitals and hospices, says that “the times today call for this kind of a religious order,” a flexible order, comprising older women who want something other than traditional roles in their golden years. “Raising kids, working in the world, it gives us the experience” to serve the poor and the sick with wisdom and understanding. Of course, not everyone will close The Prison Angel and decide to move to La Mesa. But no one will be untouched by this remarkable book about a remarkable woman.
Originally Published in: Washington Post, May 26, 2005.