c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Twenty-eight years ago, a short, wealthy Californian pulled on a black dress and a black veil that she had stitched herself, trying to look “nunny.” She stood before her mirror and took the name Mother Antonia, chosen for the Catholic priest who had inspired her to stick with her faith.

Three decades ago, no religious order would consider a twice-divorced 51-year-old novitiate. So Mary Brenner committed the audacious act of making private vows and moving into a Tijuana prison where she lived among its sick and reviled inmates.

Twenty-three years later, Mother Antonia carried the offertory gifts to Pope John Paul II as he celebrated a vast outdoor Mass in northern Mexico. Then the pontiff reached out and touched Mother Antonia’s cheek.

That gesture _ toward a woman denied Communion for a quarter-century because she divorced and remarried _ was profound, report Mary Jordan and husband Kevin Sullivan in their new biography, “The Prison Angel.”

Yet for hundreds of souls in Tijuana and San Diego, the pope’s touch was a fitting, if late, acknowledgment of the common local wisdom: the former Mary Brenner amounted to a living saint.

Now 78, Mother Antonia still lives in an unheated cell in La Mesa, the notorious Tijuana prison, taking frequent hits from the oxygen tank that eases her breathing. That is where Jordan and Sullivan found her in 2002.

News of her radical kindness had reached them, and the two decided to see for themselves. The result is “The Prison Angel,” a book both moving and important in its depiction of an exceptional life.

Writing about goodness is difficult, and the authors don’t pretend to be neutral. They open with the unarmed nun singlehandedly quelling a prison riot, and they close by writing “there are no words to describe” what Mother Antonia has given to them personally.

Very few cynics will read “The Prison Angel.” But for those drawn to stories about seemingly regular people making radical choices, this book is compelling. After their somewhat purple opening, the authors employ clean, declarative prose.

Like Mother Teresa, Mother Antonia gravitates toward outcasts, prostitutes and criminals, corrupt guards and mentally deranged prisoners. She recruits nurses, grocers, dentists and a plastic surgeon into her work. She ministers to a captured drug kingpin, reassuring him of God’s love, impervious to the man’s history of torturing a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and tape-recording his screams.

At times, “The Prison Angel” veers close to a stack of testimonials, people from all walks singing the nun’s praises. (The local bishop recognized her vocation formally in 1978.) The authors’ keen interest in the failings of Mexican criminal justice also colors the text. The best parts depict the ingenious ways in which Mother Antonia gradually undermines the eye-for-an-eye ethos that permeated La Mesa.

Mother Antonia is most human in the closing pages, where she is worn and wondering, on occasion, what a pleasure retirement might be. “She has taken to wearing a long white nightgown in bed, in case she dies in her sleep,” the authors write. She calls it her “dead in bed” nightgown.

Readers will leave this nun’s company reluctantly and thank Jordan and Sullivan for making her remarkable life visible in a jaded world.

MO/RR/PH END LONG

(Karen R. Long is the book editor for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

Editors: Check the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Jordan and Sullivan and book cover to accompany this story. A version of this story has moved on Newhouse News Service.

`The Prison Angel’ by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan (Penguin Press, 237 pages, $24.95)