The winners of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting tell
the astonishing story of Mary Clarke. At the age of fifty, Clarke left
her comfortable life in suburban Los Angeles to follow a spiritual
calling to care for the prisoners in one of Mexico's most notorious
jails. She actually moved into a cell to live among drug king pins and
petty thieves. She has led many of them through profound spiritual
transformations in which they turned away from their lives of crime, and
has deeply touched the lives of all who have witnessed the depth of her
compassion. Donning a nun's habit, she became Mother Antonia, renowned
as "the prison angel," and has now organized a new community of
sisters-the Servants of the Eleventh Hour--widows and divorced women
seeking new meaning in their lives. "We had never heard a story like
hers," Jordan and Sullivan write, "a story of such powerful goodness."
Born in Beverly Hills, Clarke was raised around the glamour of Hollywood
and looked like a star herself, a beautiful blonde reminiscent of Grace
Kelly. The choreographer Busby Berkeley spotted her at a restaurant and
offered her a job, but Mary's dream was to be a happy wife and mother.
She raised seven children, but her two unfulfilling marriages ended in
divorce. Then in the late 1960s, in midlife, she began devoting herself
to charity work, realizing she had an extraordinary talent for drumming
up donations for the sick and poor.
On one charity mission across the Mexican border to the drug-trafficking
capitol of Tijuana, she visited La Mesa prison and experienced an
intense feeling that she had found her true life's work. As she recalls,
"I felt like I had come home." Receiving the blessings of the Catholic
Church for her mission, on March 19, 1977, at the age of fifty, she
moved into a cell in La Mesa, sleeping on a bunk with female prisoners
above and below her. Nearly twenty-eight years later she is still living
in that cell, and the remarkable power of her spiritual counseling to
the prisoners has become legendary.
The story of both one woman's profound journey of discovery and growth
and of the deep spiritual awakenings she has called forth in so many
lost souls, The Prison Angel is an astonishing testament to the
powers of personal transformation.
