Mother Angelica, the Nun Who Shaped the American Catholic Church, Dies at 92

Mother Angelica, the nun who created the television network EWTN and shaped the Catholic Church in America in the late twentieth century as much as any bishop or priest, died yesterday, on Easter Sunday. The Franciscan nun stood for an orthodox and mainstream Catholicism that made her wildly popular with lay Catholics but disliked by both traditionalists and progressives. She was 93.

Symbolic of her kind of Catholicism and the effect she had was her convent’s decision in 1993 to return to the traditional forms of the nun’s habit, giving up the modernized version they had been wearing. Progressive Catholics were displeased, as they were by her promotion of traditional Catholic devotions and conservative theologians and writers like the convert biblical scholar Scott Hahn. At the same time, she upset traditionalists by accepting the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, worshipping with the modern liturgy and promoting convert theologians and writers like (again) Scott Hahn.

Mother Angelica founded EWTN (the Eternal Word Television Network) in 1981. The network produces round-the-clock programs and claims to reach 264 million homes in 144 countries. It also programs for radio, including shortwave radio, and publishes the weekly newspaper The National Catholic Register and the Catholic News Agency.

“Mother Angelica succeeded at a task the nation’s bishops themselves couldn’t achieve,” said a clerical leader of the conservative wing of American Catholicism, Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput. A member of EWTN’s board of governors, he added, “She founded and grew a network that appealed to everyday Catholics, understood their needs and fed their spirits. She had a lot of help, obviously, but that was part of her genius.”

“She was such a great support to Pope John Paul II and his successor,” said Raymond Arroyo, Mother Angelica’s biographer and longtime host of the EWTN news show The World Over, also quoted by CNA. “Her active ministry ran parallel to Pope John Paul II’s, and she backed him up at a time when so many people were undermining Church authority, distorting the history and nature of the liturgy and popular devotion, and confusing Catholic teaching. She showed that the commonsense approach of Catholics was right. She normalized the truth of the faith at a time when it was up for grabs.”

Her Life and Ministry

Born Rita Antoinette Rizzo in Canton, Ohio, in 1923, she entered the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in 1944. Her father had left the family when she was very young and she grew up in poverty. The Poor Clares (as they are called) are a cloistered, contemplative order, meaning that they live separated from the world and dedicate their lives to prayer. Nuns take a new name when they officially enter an order, and she took the name Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation.

A Poor Clare sister isn’t a likely person to start a television network, much less one as successful as EWTN. CNA tells the story of how she came to found one. (Here is a video of Mother Angelica herself telling the story.) As a young nun, Angelica had hurt her back so badly that doctors thought she might never walk again. In the hospital, she told God that if he healed her, she’d found a convent in the south, which then, in the early 1950s, had a tiny number of Catholics.

“God kept his end, and through divine Providence, so did I,” she said later. After she and four sisters founded a new convent in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, which grew rapidly. She started recording talks and then television shows, until:

While utilizing a secular studio to produce programs for a Christian cable television network one day in 1978, Mother Angelica heard that the station owned by the studio planned to air a program she felt was blasphemous. [Other sources report that the show was going to show Jesus as a woman.]

“When I found out that the station was going to broadcast a blasphemous movie, I confronted the station manager and objected,” said Mother Angelica. “He ignored my complaint, so I told him I would go elsewhere to make my tapes. He told me, ‘You leave this station and you’re off television.’”

“I’ll build my own!” responded Mother Angelica.

And she did, using a garage as the station’s first studio. At the beginning, the network broadcast for only a few hours a day, mixing religious programming, mostly reruns, with some secular programming. It was anchored, as it would be for many years, by Mother Angelica’s own talk show, Mother Angelica Live. It steadily added more original programming, including Arroyo’s news show, convert interviews in The Journey Home, and Hahn’s Bible studies. She hosted her show and led the network until 2000. In 2001 she suffered the first of several strokes. She retired from public life but the work she had begun kept growing.

Her Work

Mother Angelica, improbable founder of a worldwide television network, created something badly needed not only then but now. Writing on his FaceBook page, noted canon (or church) lawyer Edward Peters explained the effect of her work this way:

The present generation of Catholics who grew up with ranks of orthodox (if not always articulate) bishops in the episcopal conference, the legacy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI behind them and, most of all, the internet around them, cannot imagine what it meant for us isolated believers, in the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, to have some clunky nun from Canton Ohio set up shop in the Deep South and start broadcasting flat-out Catholic common sense like too few priests and almost no bishops in those days would do. EWTN was a lifeline in the flood of nonsense that emanated from so much of officialdom.

Tom Nash, until recently a theological advisor at EWTN, noted another side of her appeal: “She herself grew up in a broken family. Her parents were divorced, and she grew up in a single-parent household. She had credibility with people because she had been through some difficult times herself. Mother could be tough as nails, but she also was always there to reach out to those who were broken or had difficulties.”

She “was many things,” wrote leading Catholic journalist John L. Allen on the website Crux: “A lightning rod, a force of nature, an impresario, an entertainer, a deft commentator and pundit, and, beneath it all, a faithful and pious nun. Love her or hate her, she will be sorely missed — the Church just isn’t as much fun without her around to stir the waters, raise our blood pressure, get us to think and remind us to pray.”

The Catholic Church in America would look very different — meaning, not nearly as good — had that nun lying in the hospital had not been inspired to make that deal with God, nor had the ability, wisdom, conviction and drive to pull it off. Rest in peace, Mother.

For more on Mother Angelica’s life and ministry, see the biographical story published by the Catholic News Agency, this collection of tributes from others in Catholic media, and this short biography with the schedule of events around her funeral.