Mother Antonia Brenner, who has died aged 86, was a twice-divorced former Hollywood socialite and mother of seven who, in 1977, gave away most of her possessions, put on a homemade nun’s habit and went to live in a Mexican prison.
At first the Roman Catholic Church declined to give her its support; indeed for many years, as a divorcée she had been unable to take Holy Communion. Nothing daunted, she left her home in Ventura, California, packed in her job, made her vows in private and moved into a bunk in the women’s wing of La Mesa Tijuana, a prison housing 7,500 male and 500 female prisoners, later moving to her own 10-by-10-ft concrete cell.
La Mesa was a notorious hellhole where rich drug lords ruled the roost while hundreds of their poorer brethren lived in the cold and squalor amid rats and raw sewage, with no beds, food or even lavatory paper unless their relatives brought supplies. Brutalized prison guards contributed to the misery, mistreating the mentally ill and administering cruel interrogations.
Over the next 30 years “Madre Antonia,” as she came to be known, transformed the atmosphere. Armed with a Bible, a Spanish dictionary, and her own unassailable moral authority, she waded into riots and gun battles; shamed prison authorities into improving conditions and brought human rights violations to the attention of newspapers.
She persuaded doctors and dentists to hold free clinics, got local bakers to donate bread to supplement the meager prison rations, rescued lavatories from junk yards and insisted on their being installed, prayed with prisoners and guards and got to know their families. She taught offenders to acknowledge they had done wrong, and many would later testify that her example had persuaded them to mend their ways.
She also took on the Mexican legal system, raising money to pay fines to keep petty offenders out of prison and accompanying inmates to court in order to force judges to justify the wildly different sentences they handed out to rich and poor. One Tijuana judge acknowledged that she had convinced him that class should not be a factor in the administration of justice.
After a year her service came to the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities, and 18 months into her ministry the Bishop of Tijuana, Juan Jesus Posadas, made her an auxiliary Mercedarian, an order which works among prisoners. Subsequently her work came to the attention of Pope John Paul II who gave her his blessing. In 1991 Mother Teresa visited Tijuana to see her work.
In 1997 Antonia began the process of forming the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour, a religious community of women who serve the poor and downtrodden. She bought a house near the prison to serve as a refuge for women leaving the prison, for women and children visiting family members, and women and children in Tijuana for cancer treatment. In 2003 the community, many of them older women who had been turned away by other religious communities because of their age, was formally accepted by the Bishop of Tijuana.
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