HERO
MOTHER ANTONIA (AKA MARY CLARKE)
AND THE POWER OF A HUG IN A PRISON

During the Great Depression, Mary Clarke was born into a poor family. Her father had not only lost a good job, but also lost his wife during her fourth pregnancy and the baby as well. He prospered during the boom years of World War II and moved his family to Beverley Hills, where his neighbors included movie stars like Willliam Powell, Hedy Lamarr, John Barrymore, and Dinah Shore. Joe Clarke, however, never let his children forget that they were once poor.

His daughter Mary grew up to be a stunningly beautiful woman, but she later admitted that she was too young when she married the first time and too impulsive about entering a second marriage. The two marriages, both ending in divorce, had given her seven children.

When Mary was fifty years old, on a visit to Tijuana, Mexico she heard about the notorious La Mesa prison and arranged to enter it. There she heard horror stories about the way prisoners were treated by the guards and other inmates even though some of the crimes were petty. Drug traffic flourished in the prison and riots, torture, bribery, murders and rapes were common. Mary Clarke had found her vocation. She began to work daily in that prison, and she has continued to do that for the past 28 years.

Clarke enlisted her wealthy friends to provide money for blankets, clothing, towels, soap, toilet paper, tooth brushes, combs and sundry items that helped make life more livable in that hell hole. Every week her friends from San Diego brought these items across the border to the prison.

Remarkably, she persuaded the warden to let her have her own cell. It was in a cold, damp area with only cold water for showering, but she gladly accepted it so she could be there for prisoners when they needed her. She was free to mingle among the prisoners and hear why they had been incarcerated. Some had committed serious crimes like murder and robbery, but many others were being severely punished for stealing food and clothing needed by their families. She often went to the court house as an advocate for a prisoner.

Daily Mary preached the Gospel of forgiveness to prisoners, who had grown up in a culture that expected them to avenge criminal acts against them, their friends or their families. Often she was called by prison authorities to quell a riot that had erupted in the prison yard.

Church authorities denied Mary’s request to enter a religious community because of her age and her failed marriages, so she wore a white habit which she had sewn and became known by all as Mother Antonia. She administered to the sick and the dying, even those with AIDS. Her fame spread throughout the prison and through the cities of Tijuana and San Diego. A life-sized picture of her graces one of the walls of the Tijuana airport because she is so famous in that city.

When Pope John Paul II visited Mexico and celebrated Mass for hundreds of thousands, Mother Antonia’s name was called to bring up the offertory gifts. The Pope gave this woman a blessing, a woman who ten years earlier had been denied entrance into a religious order. She has since founded a religious community called the Sisters of the Eleventh Hour which welcomes women between the ages of 45 and 65 who want to live out their remaining years serving the needy and the poor.

I was moved to write about Mother Antonia after I read The Prison Angel by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, a married couple who are journalists for the Washington Post. A Clevelander, Jordan is a graduate of Saint Joseph Academy. In 2003 she and Sullivan won Pulitzers for their international reporting on the prison system in Mexico.

Jordan and Sullivan sum up the life of Mother Antonia with these words: “Long a rebel and an innovator, she accepts people the church has resisted. Those who have been widowed or divorced and those with gray hair. The poet Donald Hall once wrote about a bag he found in his grandmother’s attic that was stuffed full of bits of string and marked ‘String too short to be saved.’ Mother Antonia is like Hall’s grandmother. She believes everyone is useful and no one should be discarded.”

Father Jim O’Donnell, who ministers to prisoners at the Juvenile Detention Center and the Prison for Women on E. 30th and Orange, believes that too. Recently, he told Anita and me, he brought Mother Antonia to Cleveland and asked her to address tough juveniles at the Juvenile Detention Center. They sat in rapt attention. At the end of her talk, she went up to a big muscular young man and told him to stand up.

“Would you like a mother’s hug?” she asked him. He said he would. So Mother Antonia hugged him. Soon the other 29 delinquents silently followed and each was hugged by this woman who is filled with love and the gospel of forgiveness.

All those kids know the power of fists and bullets. But this was probably the first time they had ever seen the power of love.

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