Mother Antonia Brenner (1926-2013), a former Beverly Hills socialite and foundress of the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour, was a force of nature.
She not only ministered to but actually lived with the inmates at La Mesa, a notorious maximum-security prison in Tijuana, Mexico.
Born Mary Clark in Los Angeles, Brenner was the middle of three children. Her mother died giving birth to the fourth child. Her father ran a successful office supply business.
A marriage at 19 produced three children, one of whom died shortly after birth, and ended in divorce. With her second husband, Carl Brenner, she had five more children.
Living in Beverly Hills during that second marriage, Brenner was active in charity work. In the 1960s, Father Henry Vetter, a Pasadena priest, invited her to visit Tijuana. They ended up at La Mesa, and she began making regular trips to distribute aspirin, toilet paper, and eyeglasses to thieves, rapists, and murderers.
The work galvanized her. Her heart opened both to the victims and the perpetrators of violence. She was appalled by the grim prison conditions, especially for the poor and mentally ill, and by the corruption she saw on both sides of the border.
After 25 years, her marriage to Brenner ended in divorce. She moved to San Diego, which made visiting the prison easier. When her youngest child, Antony, reached adolescence, she made the wrenching decision to cede custody to Brenner, then gave away her belongings, and in 1977 moved to Tijuana in order to be near the inmates.
In her early years of volunteering at La Mesa, Brenner took informal vows and sewed her own habit. Her service came to the attention of Bishop Juan Jesus Posadas of Tijuana and Bishop Leo Maher of neighboring San Diego, and her work was eventually blessed by both. Bishop Maher made her an auxiliary to him while Bishop Posadas made her an auxiliary Mercedarian, an order that has a special devotion to prisoners. At age 50, she became an official sister.
Petite, indefatigable in her spotless white veil, she moved shortly afterward into the women’s section of the prison, and came to live as one of the inmates, in a 10 by 10 cell. She ate the same prison fare and with the members of her flock, lined up for morning roll call.
In a 1982 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Brenner said, “Something happened to me when I saw men behind bars. … 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. I wondered if they had medicine and how their families were doing. …You know, when I returned to the prison to live, I felt as if I’d come home.”
“Prison Angel” (Penguin Books, $8.99), written in 2005 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, tells the in-depth story.
“La Mama,” as she was known by the prison inmates, chugged coffee nonstop and got by on three or four hours of nightly sleep. She lobbied for reform of the brutal prison conditions, and she also supported the prison guards whose dangerous and emotionally draining jobs were poorly paid.
She was notorious, in and out of the Church, for her fundraising abilities, a combination of wheedling, humor, and charm. When Father Joe Carroll, head of the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop in San Francisco, got fed up with Antonia’s siphoning off of their donated goods and approached one day to confront her, Antonia played dumb, fell to her knees, and asked for a blessing. The two became fast friends. “She’s a thief!” he’d affectionately exclaim.
Over time, Antonia’s efforts came to extend to the community at large. With a team of volunteers, and her broken Spanglish, she helped as many of Tijuana’s innumerable poor and sick as she could. She coaxed dentists into fixing the broken teeth of prison inmates for free. She coaxed a well-known San Diego plastic surgeon and his wife to come to La Mesa once a week and perform tattoo removals, scar smoothing, and cleft palate reconstructions. Once a month, she arranged for a Mass to be said for the city’s unclaimed dead.
She sat by the bedsides of patients who were dying from the effects of police brutality. She waded unarmed into prison riots and helped broker peace. She delivered reports from inside to wives, girlfriends, and family members who thronged the prison 24/7. She admonished drug lords to repent and do something useful with their lives; she begged torture victims to forgive, she believed in the seemingly unredeemable until they could believe in themselves.
Around 1997, she founded the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour for older women with a desire to serve the poor. In 2003 the Bishop of Tijuana formally approved the community.
“Pleasure depends on where you are, who you are with, what you are eating,” she proclaimed.
“Happiness is different. Happiness does not depend on where you are. I live in prison. And I have not had a day of depression in 25 years. I have been upset, angry. I have been sad. But never depressed. I have a reason for my being.”
She died of natural causes at 86 in her Tijuana home.
“Charity is not a thing you do,” she once said, “it’s love, it’s who you become. I was a salesman for the poor.”
