From the LA Times: “Sister Antonia Brenner, a Beverly Hills-raised mother of seven who became a Roman Catholic nun and moved into a notorious Tijuana prison where she spent more than three decades mending broken lives, easing tensions, and dispensing everything from toothbrushes to bail money, has died [of natural causes]. She was 86.”
The daughter of wealthy Irish immigrants, Brenner grew up in Beverly Hills, married twice and raised a family of seven there. In 1977, after her children were grown and her second marriage ended in divorce, she gave away all her expensive clothes and jewelry and moved to La Mesa penitentiary in Mexico, where she had delivered donations in the past as part of her charity work.
Says the Times: “Small of stature, with blue eyes peeking out from under her traditional black–and-white habit, Brenner cut a strikingly serene presence in the overcrowded prison of 8,000. She lived as any other inmate, sleeping in a 10-by-10-foot cell, eating the same food and lining up for morning roll call.
“She would walk freely among thieves and drug traffickers and murderers, smiling, touching cheeks and offering prayers. Many were violent men with desperate needs. She kept extra toilet paper in her cell, arranged for medical treatment, attended funerals… When prayers didn’t work, she took matters into her own hands. On more than a few occasions she broke up fights and quelled brewing riots.
“Guards and inmates alike started referring to her as the prison angel. In the cellblocks she was known simply as ‘Mama.’
“A revered figure in Tijuana, where she counted police chiefs and politicians among her friends, Brenner was honored with the naming of a street after her outside the prison. In the late 1990s, she established her own religious order, the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour. Tijuana Archbishop Rafael Romo said she possessed the qualities of a saint and said her death was a ‘terrible loss’ for the city.
“You walk in her presence and you know you’re in a different world,” Father Joe Carroll said. “Rhyme, reason — you can’t rationalize why she did it. She has that one-on-one relationship with God.”
Check out an excerpt from La Mama: An American Nun‘s Life here.
