Sister Antonia - Once a privileged Los Angeles housewife, Sister Antonia now helps reform prison inmates.

[Guest guest]

I was reading last month's edition of Reader's Digest and came across a

beautiful article on Sister Antonia. I thought i did rather share it with all

of you. It is really a giant leap she has taken. Swami is working through such

people all over the world to uplift mankind. If a person who might have not

known SAI but yet so devoted to mankind, then we who have been getting HIS LOVE

so profusely should make a beginning towards the less fortunate.

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A riot was raging through La Mesa prison in Tijuana, Mexico. Twenty-Five hundred

fed-up prisoners packed into a compound built for 600 angrily hurled broken

bottles at police, who fired back with machine guns. “There was blood

everywhere,” remembers one inmate, “people lighting fires, people going crazy.”

 

Then, at the peak of the pandemonium, came a startling sight: A tiny,

five-foot-two, 63 year old American woman in an immaculate nun’s habit calmly

strolled into the battle, hands outstretched in a simple gesture of peace.

Ignoring the shower of bullets and flying bottles, she stood quietly and

ordered everyone to stop. Incredibly, they did. “No one else in the world but

Sister Antonia could have done that,” says Robert Cass, a former inmate, now

rehabilitated and living in San Diego. “She has changed thousands of people’s

lives.”

 

In Tijuana, when Sister Antonia walks along a sidewalk, traffic in the street

routinely stops; people there affectionately claim her as their own Mother

Teresa. For the past quarter-century, she has lived, by choice, in a ten-foot

concrete cell at La Mesa, without hot water, surrounded by murderers, thieves

and drug lords, all of whom she lovingly calls as her “sons”. She attends to

their needs round the clock, raising bail money, procuring antibiotics,

distributing eyeglasses and false teeth, counseling the suicidal, washing

bodies for burial. “I live on the premises,” she explains with no hint of

complaint, ”in case someone is stabbed in the middle of the night.”

 

It is a world away from the plush precincts of Beverly Hills where Sister

Antonia – then Mary Clarke – grew up. Her father, from humble beginnings, owned

a prosperous office-supply company. “He always said that it’s easier to suffer

when you are rich,” she remembers. He also told her that once a Beverly Hills

girl, always a Beverly Hills girl. She believed him.

 

“I was romantic,” she says, “and still am, really – always looking at the world

through rose-colored glasses.” Clarke grew up during the heyday of Hollywood –

big stars tap-dancing down the stairs, bells ringing for me and my gal – and

also during the World War-II. A vibrant beauty by her teens, she spent her

weekend evenings dancing with young soldiers at the canteen and dreaming about

the future. Her dream included a husband, many children and a picture-book

house.

 

It all came true. After graduating from high school, Clarke married and raised

seven children in an airy Granada Hills home. Twenty-five years later, the

marriage ended in a divorce, a subject that remains painful for her and which

she declines to discuss. “Because a dream ends doesn’t mean that it didn’t come

true once,” she says, blue eyes flashing. “What matters now and is my second

life.”

 

With her marriage over and her children, with whom she stays in close touch,

grown, she turned instinctively to helping the less fortunate. The suffering of

others had always affected her profoundly. “I walked out of Mutiny on the Bounty

because I couldn’t stand seeing men tied to the mast and lashed,” she says. “If

other are humiliated, you are humiliated too. I still can’t bear to see prison

movies, though I live in a prison.” She had kept her father’s business for 17

years following his death at age 50, but had no desire to expand it. “It takes

the same amount of energy to make business calls as it does to make calls to

get beds donated to hospitals in Peru,” she points out. “There comes a time

when you can’t just be a spectator. You have to step outside the lines.”

 

In her case, she took a giant leap. In the mid-‘60s she began traveling across

the Mexican border with a Catholic priest to take medicines and supplies to the

poor. She had fallen in love with the country before ever laying eyes on it. In

a long-ago childhood game, she had inexplicably chosen Mexico. ‘At that time, “

she notes, “the only Mexicans I knew were gardeners.” Now she found herself

deeply drawn to the people.

 

Her second life began the day she and the priest got lost in Tijuana. Looking

for the local jail, they wound up by mistake at La Mesa. “It’s only ten miles

from the border, but like 100 if you don’t know where you are going,” she

explains. She was instantly moved by what she saw. “In the infirmary, men were

desperately sick, yet would stand when you entered.” Soon she was spending

nights there, sleeping on a bunk in the women’s section, learning Spanish,

assisting the inmates and their families in any way she could.

 

In 1977, convinced that she had found God’s true purpose for her, Mary Clarke

became Sister Antonia, making her private vows with the bishops of Tijuana and

San Diego. La Mesa prison became her permanent home, the place she even chooses

to spend Christmas Eve. “Her children understand her priorities,” says her

friend Noreen Walsh-Begun. “They realized that she cared for them, and now it’s

her turn to care for others.”

 

She had been a squeamish mom. “Oh, my, when any of my children needed stitches

or were bleeding, I’d almost faint.” But nothing that has happened inside La

Mesa has been too shocking to handle. “I have seen a lot,” says Sister Antonia.

She was especially close to a warden who was dragged from his car nine years ago

and brutally executed. “There is nothing now that I cannot face head-on.”

 

“I don’t know how anyone keeps up with her,” says Cass, the former inmate who

recently named his new born daughter after Sister Antonia. She’s awake before

dawn, praying and speaking the chapel. For 25 years she never missed the

morning grito, when the guards lined up and new prisoners walked through a

gauntlet-like column, saying their names and why they were incarcerated. “It

was terrifying and humiliating for them,” Cass says, “but Sister Antonia would

be right there, advising them what to do (‘Look them in the eye, don’t show any

attitude’), providing some bread and comfort. She is always rushing, yet always

has time for you. I have seen her late at night when someone is stabbed – which

is not uncommon – insist on running out to find lidocaine, no matter how

exhausted she is, rather than let the victim be sewn up without

anesthetic. She is not loved without reason.”

 

Love, says Sister Antonia, is what she offers everyone. ‘I am hard on crime, but

not the criminal,” she says. “Just this morning, I talked to a young man, 19

years old, who had stolen a car. I asked him if he had any idea what a car

means to a family, how long it takes to buy one. I said, ‘I love you, but I

don’t sympathize with you. Do u have a girlfriend? Well, maybe someone will

steal her while you are in here.’ Then I hugged him.” She hugs everyone,

including the guards, whom she also instructs and counsels.

 

For years, Sister Antonia zipped around Tijuana in what was once a New York

Checker cab, repainted royal blue. “One day I backed into a police car,” she

says, laughing boisterously, “and my immediate thought was, Oh, thank God,

which I realize is not a typical response, but I love the police and they love

me.”

 

Eight years ago, she started Brazos Abiertos (Open Arms), a charitable

organization for the widows and children of policemen killed in the line of

duty. “We have nothing but love and respect for her,” says Brazos president

Roberto Sanchez-Osario. “She recognizes that both the delinquents and the

police are human beings – and she creates the bridge.”

 

Mexican prison inmates and their families are not, Sister Antonia observes, a

popular charitable cause. A charismatic speaker, she has nonetheless attracted

a whole network of supporters who contribute everything from mattresses to

medicines to money. A local dentist has provided thousands of sets of false

teeth at cost for prisoners who had never seen a toothbrush. “You have to be

able to smile in order to get a job,” snaps Sister Antonia. “You must have

teeth.” An American eye doctor has sent thousands of pairs of glasses, and

plastic surgeons have donated their services. “No one can say no to her,” says

Joanie Kenesie, a San Diego widow who is now Sister Antonia’s chief assistant.

 

Wanting other women in the midlife to share in the joyous satisfaction she has

experienced, Sister Antonia recently founded Servants of the Eleventh Hour, an

order for older women. Eight sisters have now taken vows along with 16

associates, including an ocology nurse who works at the AIDS hospice. Recent

arrival Kathleen Marie Todora, a 69 year old widow and mother of four from

Baton Rouge, says, “I tried two other orders and was told I was too old before

I heard of Servants of the Eleventh Hour. I could not wait to get here. My car

burned up in the desert 28 miles outside San Diego, and it didn’t matter. Just

left it there. Joanie came and got me. I think Sister Antonia’s probably the

most unique human being I’ve ever met in my life. A saint

really, which we are sure she will become. She has opened a door with this

order. We are getting inquiries from all over the country.”

 

“Sister Antonia envisions it going all over the world,” says Kenesie. “And

whatever she envisions inevitably seems to happen. She starts things and they

take on a life of their own. That is her special gift – or one of them.”

 

Sister Antonia says she’s the most fortunate person on the planet. “I live in a

prison,” she says, “but I have not experienced one day of depression in 27

years, never felt hopeless. And I have never once felt there wasn’t something I

could do to make things better.”