Mother Antonia: a Life of Non-Violence

This semester one of my assignments was to write a paper about a person who is a voice of non-violence. I almost immediately thought of Mother Antonia. Her story is one that has inspired and sustained me though seminary. So I wrote about her for the class. Karen posted her paper on Peter, Paul, and Mary on her blog and I thought it was such a good idea that I would follow suit. Blogger has deleted my footnotes, but the Bibliography is at the end. Enjoy!

Non-Violence as a Way of Life

One of the things that has struck me in our study of the “voices of non-violence” is how non-violence is not only a method of social change, but a way of life for many of those who seek to make the world a more hospitable place for people and the realization of justice. This is something that I think can be said for many of the individual “voices of non-violence” we have studied this semester. Non-violence as way of life is particularly something that we encountered as we studied the work and lives of Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, Andre Trocme, Dorothy Day, and Cesar Chavez. When we read Dorothy Day, however, something within me went back to a woman I had met a few years earlier. I believe it was in the summer of 2005, that I saw a sign announcing an event at a bookstore in San Diego. What captured my attention was the headline: “The Prison Angel: Mother Antonia’s Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life in a Mexican Jail.” Intrigued by the notion of prison ministry, the headline piqued my interest. I had to go. As it turns out the headline was also the tile of a book, The Prison Angel: Mother Antonia’s Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life in a Mexican Jail, by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan. This journalism couple had heard of “an Irish nun . . . who lived in a cell alongside the inmates, helping to feed and clothe them and protect them from abuse by guards” while working on a series of stories about the Mexican prison system for the Washington Post. They were soon to come to know the work of a woman known as Mother Antonia. As I was to learn at the book signing in 2005, Mother Antonia is anything but your ordinary nun! Mother Antonia was present at this book signing. What I heard that day, from this small, seemly fragile, woman who was such a powerful agent of change and peace, simply awed me. I did not even have words to speak with her. Her simple presence is almost indescribable; it simply transforms you to be in the same room as her. Later that summer, I confessed to my pastor that, while I probably should have been reading theology in preparation seminary, I simply could not resist reading Mother Antonia’s story. His response to me was “that is theology.” Indeed. It is theology of highest kind. In this paper, I will present some biographical information about Mother Antonia—including her religious journey and struggles—and seek to show how her work in Mexican prisons has established of a ministry with and for the poor there, as well as enabled her to become a “voice of nonviolence” in one of the most dangerous places in places in North America. I will conclude by considering what may come of Mother Antonia’s ministries in the future.
Mother Antonia has become a powerful presence for quelling the violence and suffering that is all too much a part of life in La Mesa prison in Tijuana, Mexico. The presence of Mother Antonia makes all the difference in such a place. As told in the book about her life, on Halloween night in 1994, on the eve of the Mexican cultural holiday Dias de la Murtes, a riot broke out in the “punishment cells” of La Mesa Prison. Mother Antonia was out at the time, but hurried back to the prison only to find that the guards were getting ready to storm the prison and she would have to get special permission from the warden, who was out of town, to enter—she got her permission. Jordan and Sullivan describe what happened next this way:
She shuffles her feet carefully along the prison's cement floor, her outstretched hands feeling the way along the walls. Finding the stairway leading up, she realizes she is not alone in the blackness. The men [prisoners] have stayed with her. She doesn't know if there are five or fifty, but she feels them and hears them all around her like a human shield. She is the closest thing to heaven most of them have ever seen, this woman who brings them pillows and pure white bandages, who keeps the guards from beating them, who never stops hugging them and telling them they are loved. They call her Mother. And they are going to take a bullet rather than have La Madre die tonight.
She can feel the heavy black metal doors of cells as she passes them. The screams and shooting are close now, the smoke is sharp in her eyes and lungs. She calls out to the men in the punishment cells.
They are shocked to hear her.
"Don't shoot! Mother's here!" they yell.
"Mother Antonia! Get out of here. You'll be killed!" one inmate shouts. "Please, go. You'll be shot!"
She doesn't stop. She moves forward toward their voices.
"What's going on here? The whole city is terrified," she says. "Your mothers and girlfriends and children are outside crying. Please stop. There's an army out there getting ready to come in."
She tells them that if they don't put down their weapons, more children will be orphaned, including their own. Think of your parents crying at another family funeral, she pleads. Her voice is warm, convincing, and urgent, and it suddenly changes the ugly night.
The metal door to the punishment cell block opens. She can now see a bit by the light of burning mattresses. Her white clothes are singed with ash. An inmate she knows as Blackie steps forward from the shadows.
"Mother..."
She pushes her way inside like a running back.
"C'mon, C'mon. Give me the guns. Give me the guns right now. I'm not going to let you get hurt. I'm not going to let them hurt you and punish you. Give me the guns."
"Mother," Blackie says. "We've been up here so long they've forgotten us. The water's gone, and we're desperate."
Mother Antonia falls to her knees in the smoky hallway. She is right in front of Blackie, looking up at him with her hands held out, palms up, pleading with him.
"It's not right that you're locked up here, hungry and thirsty. We can take care of those things, but this isn't the way to do it. I will help you make it better. But first, you have to give me the guns. I beg you to put down your weapons."
"Mother," Blackie says softly, looking down at her. "As soon as we heard your voice, we dropped the guns out the window.

This episode clearly shows Mother’s Antonia’s commitment to fostering non-violence in the prison where she lives and does much of her work. It is a commitment for which she is willing to risk her life. Hers is a work that focuses on building relationships with people, and focusing the attention of others on the respect and dignity due individual human beings. It was the strength of the relationships Mother Antonia had fostered that convinced the warden to allow her to reenter the prison during a riot and caused the prisoners to give up their weapons at the sound of her voice urging non-violence. She is known for providing care and concern to both the prisoners and the guards at the prison as stance that makes her well respected by all sides in an environment that can become a war zone. But, where did Mother Antonia learn these skills? Where did she learn the ideals of liberation that declare having solidarity with a community is not the same as visiting with charitable aid? Where did she learn such a feminist theology and ethic that told her that individual relationships could be the basis for fundamental change?
A lifetime of observing the realties of poverty, and living a Catholic faith that emphasized charitable works had been Mother Antonia’s training. The events of her life show that from an early age Mother Antonia’s life was one that would be devoted to service, and eventually to the Catholic Motherhood. Mother Antonia was born Mary Clarke in 1926 in Los Angeles, California. Although her mother would die from the complications of pregnancy in 1929, her father Joseph Clarke, an Irish American familiar with poverty, would see the family through the Great Depression and become a model of charity to inspire Mary’s life and work. Joseph became a supply salesman; both defense contractors and the Hollywood movie industry would rely on him for their carbon paper needs through World War Two and beyond. By 1942, Joseph moved his children and second wife to a “lavish house on Towers Road in Beverly Hills”; their new neighbors were celebrities and he would later buy a large second home in Laguna Beach. Despite his growing fortunes, however, Joseph taught his children that it was important to patronize street vendors who struggled to make ends meet, and to give money to charity. He also took the young Mary to see the working conditions of coal miners in Pennsylvania, where he “warned her never to cross a picket line and always take the side of workers demanding fair wages and decent conditions.” His association with Jewish friends also exposed Mary at a young age to the human sufferings generated by the Holocaust; Joseph, as did his friends, sent money overseas to help at least one Jewish man escape Europe and later assisted him in finding a job in America.
The young Mary learned these lessons from her father well. It is said that his involvement in resisting the Nazis moved Mary such that she “developed a deep empathy for the Jews and respect for their faith that she would later incorporate into her mission.” The young Mary may have modeled her personality of helpfulness on her father, but she was also bold. Although she was only fifteen, she “talked recruiters into letting her join the women’s Ambulance Corps, an auxiliary force created to help military and civilian doctors in case of an attack.” It was during her affiliation with this group that Mary would begin to be known for collecting items for charitable causes.
In 1946, when she was nineteen, Mary would marry Ray Monahan who had served with her brother in the war. The youthful Mary wanted more than anything to be a mother, yet their first son, Joseph, died just three days after a difficult delivery. The loss of Joseph had a profound impact on Mary’s religious life. It caused her to question the Catholic teaching that unbaptized babies were relegated to Limbo. She also found refuge for her grief at St. Anne’s Melkite Catholic Church, of the Eastern Rite rather than the Latin Rite Church; a subsequent desire to have her second child baptized at the Eastern Rite church would cause Mary some minor conflict with the Latin Rite, but ultimately “she felt sure that God approved of all good works and prayer, whether they came from a church, a mosque, or a synagogue.” By 1949, Mary and Ray had two other children; however, financial and martial stress led Mary to realize she no longer loved Ray, so she took the kids and left. The couple would soon divorce.
At age twenty-four Mary found herself a single working mother, “work[ing] part-time for her father’s company and part-time in a real estate office he owned in Bel-Air” all the while “try[ing] to be home by five to spend time with the kids.” She soon met Carl Brenner and as soon as her divorce to Ray was finalized, Mary and Carl went to Las Vegas to be married. Mary and Carl would have five children, yet their marriage would become an emotionally distant one. As the couple spent more time apart, however, Mary continued her charity work. She insists that she was not “running away from Carl. . . . [But rather that] other people needed me. Charity is not a thing you do, its love, it’s who you become.” She raised money for hospitals, collected medical supplies to send abroad, organized charity auctions, and more. Mary would follow her father’s example by teaching her children to care for the poor, attend to individual’s needs, and work for charity.
Mary’s commitment to the Church and her charity work, lead her to cross paths with Monsignor Anthony Brouwers who would listen to her many questions and concerns about the Catholic faith. Monsignor Brouwers served as her spiritual guide and the two became confidantes. Brouwers also assured Mary that her works were evidence of her fidelity to the gospel, a message that was crucial for Mary, a divorced Catholic, to receive. Brouwers died in 1964. Mary, however, was just beginning to discover her “call to ministry.”
Another priest came into Mary’s life, who would forever change her work and her life. In 1965, Mary received a phone call from “Father Henry Vetter, a priest from Pasadena who did missionary work in Mexico”; she soon accompanied him to Tijuana where he introduced her to the La Mesa penitentiary. This place tapped into Mary’s concern for the poor. Not longer after, Mary “started coming over the border with truckloads of supplies, including mattresses the US Navy base in San Diego discarded by the hundreds.” Mary’s gift for collecting items for charities and the poor, had become a natural part of her life by this time, but now it would form the beginning of a trajectory toward full time ministry.
Carl moved out of the family home, and he and Mary divorced in 1972. Mary “wondered if she might be able to pursue her missionary dream as a Catholic sister. . . . [B]ut they did not accept anyone older than thirty-five.” Mary again, struggled with the rules and confines of her Catholic faith. Having been a regular visitor to the La Mesa prison for over ten years, at that point “on Easter Sunday 1976. . .. [s]he had made her choice; she was going to wear a habit—even if that had to be without the church’s official sanction.” Mary donned a simple dress and self made veil on March 19, 1977; she had become Mother Antonia—a name she took in honor of her old friend Monsignor Anthony Brouwers. Then, “Father Vetter . . . encouraged her to go to Our Lady of the Assumption church in Ventura, where she used to go to Mass every morning, and make personal vows.. . . Those vows did not have the weight of the church behind them but Mary figured that if she and god had an understanding, nothing else really mattered.” Mother Antonia’s youngest son, sixteen years old at the time, still lived at home and she made the hard decision to let her son slowly move in with his father; “[i]n March 1978, after a year of spending more and more nights in La Mesa, [she] sold her place in San Diego and moved into the prison for good.”
Although Mother Antonia had moved into the prison to be with the prisoners and provide them with comfort she knew that this also meant working for them outside the prison as well. The gift of collecting things for charity that she had developed as Mary Clarke would only accelerate in her work as Mother Antonia. Father Joe Carroll, who is well-known for his creation of Father Joe’s Villages to serve the poor in San Diego, was still just beginning to build his ministry in the mid-seventies. Nonetheless, Mother Antonia would soon come to him in order to gather supplies for her prisoners. Father Joe has said “once you look in her eyes, that’s it ‘No’ disappears from your vocabulary real quick”, and as a compliment he adds, “She’s a thief! The best thief I’ve ever seen! A con woman, a hustler! She’ll never stop picking your pocket.. . . I ‘m the hustler priest, But she out hustles me every time.” Mother Antonia’s reputation for doing anything to help the prisoners in La Mesa has endowed her with a unique power, one that has been known to enable her to simply wave trucks filled with supplies for her prisoners through border crossings.
Mother Antonia may have dawned the habit and taken up a ministry to the poor and imprisoned in Mexico without the Church’s blessing, but that does not mean that such a blessing was unimportant to her. One of Mother Antonia’s friends, a priest by the name of Father Jamie Rasura persuaded her to ask the church to formally bless her work. So she arranged to meet with Bishop Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo of Tijuana. As Jordan and Sullivan report:
They sat together and talked for an hour, and she told him her life story, about her two marriages that ended in divorce, her children, everything. Posadas said that he admired her work, and that, of course, he would give her his official blessing. He also asked her to take the white habit of the Mercedarians, an eight hundred year old order of priests who had a special devotion to prisoners, and he said he wanted to put the habit on her himself.

On September 24, 1978, the date that marks “the feast of Our Lady of Mercy, which commemorates that founding of the Mercedarian order”, Bishop Posadas said a mass at the La Mesa prison and put the official habit on Mother Antonia. Mother Antonia was not only a self-proclaimed but, now, a church sanctioned nun.
As a nun, Mother Antonia continued her work in the prison. One aspect of the Mexican prison system that Mother Antonia has been passionate about changing is the police brutality and other practices that strip prisoners of their human dignity in the Mexican prison system. There is a practice called the Grito at La Mesa in which the inmates are forced to stand and state their names and the crimes for which they are being held for, whether or not they have been convicted. Because this practice equated prisoner’s identity with their crime rather than humanity, and because this practice was known for fostering the violent system and the brutal occurrences for which La Mesa is known, Mother Antonia sought to abolish it. It was not until Mother Antonia had been in the prison for four years that she was permitted to be present at this event. However, she did not wait those four years to address the need for the guards to treat the prisoners as human beings. It is said that she would ask the guards to try “to put themselves in the prisoners shoes”. Mother Antonia became known for handing out personal hygiene items to the prisoners in front of the guards so that they would have to face the other’s humanity. Once she was allowed to attend the Grito, she did so every morning for over ten years, all the while seeking to end this practice; the Grito was abolished in 2003.
This small older woman is so bold in her attempts to convince individual guards to stop using brutality that she has been known to tell them, “Don’t forget, that is Christ you have in your hands. . . and he is a federale, too.” Her efforts have paid off. Prison guard Pablo Lamegos Mendez has said that “[t]he guards don’t touch the prisoners anymore. Nowadays I don’t see guards hitting prisoners, even when she is not there.” Mother Antonia has not been content to preach non-violence and human dignity in the prison but has “brought her message of nonviolence to police stations.” She even wrote a “Prayer for Police” which reads “Help me to remember that there is no justice without mercy. Give me compassion that I may have compassion for those who need it”—this prayer now “hangs in police stations all over Baja California”. Mother Antonia found herself placed in a system in which police “routinely extracted confessions and information by beating and torture”, and sought to change it. Knowing that people were working on the outside to address human rights in the Mexican prisons, she thought she would do what she could to address these issues from the inside.
Mother Antonia’s work to improve the conditions of Mexican prisons and to improve the lives of prisoners has allowed her to see the connection between poverty and incarceration. Mother Antonia’s work with the poor is also bound up with her work with prisoners in Mexican jails. Many people in the Mexican prison system are imprisoned because of small offenses for which they can not pay the fine. Mother Antonia has been known to the pay the fines of the poor so that they can gain their freedom, all the while also working to address sentencing inequities with judges in charge of the judicial system .
The scope of Mother Antonia’s work is so far reaching that it is almost incomprehensible to think that one woman could have done what she has. In addition to what has already been mentioned, Mother Antonia’s work in the prison has included: working to get amnesty for prisoners, bringing in plastic surgeons to fix disfigurements, bringing in dentists to improve the smiles of prisoners, and helping drug traffickers realize the devastating effects of their trade, and even change. Mother Antonia’s work has not been confined to the prison, outside the prison she has established “a shelter for AIDS patients” and conducts a monthly mass for the unknown and unclaimed dead of Tijuana .
In 1991 the Bishops of San Diego and Tijuana, urged Mother Antonia to encourage others to serve, as she has. Mother Antonia began work on a proposal, and in 1997 the Tijuana diocese gave consent for her to found a religious community; Bishop Rafael Romo Munzo formally accepted the order in 2003. The religious order founded by Mother Antonia is known as the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour. This order was designed to create a venue for older women, ages forty-five to sixty-five years old to minister to the poor. The Eudists, like their foundress, are an unusual order. The order does not participate in communal living nor do they share a common purse, each woman maintains her own home and financial life. It is said that Mother Antonia “prefers to have those who join her keep their bank accounts and provide as much as they can for their own expenses”. Mother Antonia has said that hers “is an order where you don’t burn your bridges behind you, . . .. We want people to keep their things and money in case they have to go back to their family.” The women of the Eudist Order, take vows for only one year at a time, but can renew their vows annually. Some members of the order commute from San Diego daily to assist Mother Antonia with her work in Tijuana, while others do similar types of ministry in other parts of the United States. Of their collective ministry, the Eudist Order states on their website that:
The Servants operate a ministry center, Casa Campos de San Miguel, located just three blocks from the La Mesa penitentiary. The Casa is a refuge for women leaving prison and for women visiting incarcerated family in the nearby prison, and also for women and children who have come to Tijuana for treatment for cancer. The sisters also have a convent nearby, Corazon de Maria, which serves as the community headquarters and is also a residence for some of the sisters in Tijuana. Corazon de Maria is also used as the community’s house of formation.

Their ministry of mission to the poor and imprisoned keeps the unusual Order of women busy.
Mother Antonia’s amazing life of service to the poor is not simply her work, or her life, it is who she is. Mother Antonia’s commitment to the poor has called her not just to collect the necessities that the poor need for their daily lives, but it has enabled her to confront the larger systematic issues that create the social problems she seeks to address. Her work in the prison has allowed her to confront the indignities that poverty, brutality, corruption, and injustice create. She has stared them in the face, told them they are wrong, and invited them to change. In her persistence of over thirty years, Mother Antonia has indeed seen and caused things to change. Her ministry is hard to critique. When I think of her ministry I am mostly called to say “amen”. The most tempting critique is to ask what happens to the ministry Mother Antonia does when she dies? However, the establishment of the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour Order is a good indication that Mother Antonia’s ministry at La Mesa prison will continue whether she is inside of it or not. The arrival in 2005 of a priest to both serve as a spiritual director of the Order and to work on the foundation of a half-way house for men released from La Mesa Penitentiary is a good sign that somehow this ministry may also continue beyond Mother Antonia’s life.
In this paper, I have provided a brief biographical sketch about Mother Antonia. I have highlighted her religious journey and few of her religious struggles. I have sought to show how her interaction with both prisoners and guards in the Mexican prison system has made her a unique voice of non-violence that speaks from inside the system rather than from without. Her approach to non-violence is one that focuses on the human dignity of each individual. I have tried to capture how her efforts to seek the release of people imprisoned simply because they cannot pay a fine, is a powerful ministry of liberation for people trapped in one of the most dangerous prisons in North America. Finally, we have looked at how Mother Antonia’s work to create a religious order may sustain her ministry into the future. Mother Antonia is a powerful woman. A powerful part of her ministry is to tend to each individual’s needs. Often enough there is an item or a word that people need from her, but occasionally there is a grave need for confession and repentance which Mother Antonia does not shy away from. Her care for the poor inspires a great hope. However, Mother Antonia is a figure who does not make it so easy for us. Her example makes clear that it is not enough to be glad that there is someone, like her, doing such work. Ultimately, I find that Mother Antonia’s ministry is one example that serves to ask me: will you do it? Will you risk your life to bring peace to the forgotten, the poor, the violent, and imprisoned? I find I have not an answer to give. I often wonder if I could forgive the drug dealers, rapists, and murders the way that Mother Antonia does. I find that, yes; it is something I think would be good to do, even if I am yet unsure how. As I reflect on the example of Mother Antonia, I find it difficult to imagine how she so thoroughly embodies non-violence that she has become it—even to the extent that she no longer seems to fear violence. I wonder if that is something I will ever learn. And it occurs to me that her degree of theological attainment is one I may never achieve!

Bibliography
“Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour.” [on-line] available from www.eudistservants.org/community.html., accessed May 8, 2008.
“LA Priest Joins Mother Antonia’s Prison Ministry in Tijuana.” Tidings. [on-line] available at http://www.the-tidings.com/2006/1201/tjpriest.htm, accessed May 8, 2008.
Jordan, Mary and Kevin Sullivan. The Prison Angel: Mother Antonia’s Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
----. [In person] Book Signing Event at Barnes and Noble in San Diego, Summer of 2005.