When Mother Angelica EXPLODED!

From Fr. John Zuhlsdorf:



Link:

• FROM THE ARCHIVE: 1993 – When Mother Angelica EXPLODED!

Mother Angelica dies aged 92

A Roman Catholic nun in the US who founded a global media empire has died aged 92.

(BBC) Mother Mary Angelica, who started the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) in a monastery garage, died at her rural monastery in the state of Alabama.

Born Rita Rizzo to a poor family in Ohio, she became known to millions of viewers of her show as Mother Angelica.

Her health had been declining since she suffered a stroke in 2001.

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley was among those to pay tribute.

"She left an indelible mark on Alabama, the Catholic Church and the world as a whole,'' he said.

EWTN's chairman Michael Warsaw said Mother Angelica would always personify the network.

"In the face of sickness and long-suffering trials, Mother's example of joy and prayerful perseverance exemplified the Franciscan spirit she held so dear," he said.

Mother Angelica became a nun in Cleveland aged 21 and founded a new monastery near Birmingham in Alabama in 1962.

She launched EWTN after refusing to continue broadcasting from a secular TV station that she said was also broadcasting blasphemous films, the Catholic News Agency reported.

Although ill health prevented her from appearing on her "Mother Angelica Live" show towards the end of her life, old episodes continued to be broadcast.

EWTN claims to be the world's biggest religious media network. It has 11 channels reaching more than 250m homes in 145 countries. It also operates radio stations and newspapers.

The network, which has been at times been criticised by both liberal and conservative Catholics, says it tries to be loyal to the Vatican and reports extensively on the Pope's statements and trips.

Link:

• TV nun Mother Angelica dies aged 92

Related:

• A Threat from Within [EWTN, Mother Angelica, & the USCCB]
• You and I Are Not the Eucharist, You and I Are Poor Sinners
• Mother Angelica: Life-long Catholic - The Journey Home Program
• Cardinal Mahony Versus Mother Angelica
• Double Barrel 
• Go Get 'Em, Mother! 
• The Battle Heats Up
• EWTN Sues HHS and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius To Stop Contraception Mandate
• Assisi & Hanceville
• OLAM Mass Changes - Mother Angelica
• New Blog: The Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration
• Father Steven Scheier Describes his Near Death Experience on Mother Angelica Live
• Quote
• A Most Diligent Mother: Angelica
• Mother Angelica

Mother Angelica: Life-long Catholic - The Journey Home Program

Double Barrel

Go Get 'Em, Mother!

Related:

• The Battle Heats Up
• BREAKING: NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade Goes Gay - Dolan Cheers! 
• Bishop Sheen Cause Suspended, Call for Prayer  
• St. Patrick’s Day Parade ending ban on gay groups
• A Threat from Within [EWTN, Mother Angelica, & the USCCB]
• Cardinal Mahony Versus Mother Angelica
• Quote

The Battle Heats Up

Related:

• A Threat from Within [EWTN, Mother Angelica, & the USCCB]
• Cardinal Mahony Versus Mother Angelica
• Quote

Cardinal Mahony Versus Mother Angelica

Repost from November 18, 2009:

By John Zmirak

...The source of Mother Angelica's Olympic-level diligence was the fiercely protective love a woman bears her husband -- especially when he suffers innocently for others. She couldn't bear to see her Beloved mocked, and she wouldn't stand idly by. So when that network flippantly questioned the Resurrection, she did found her own network. When U.S. bishops greeted a visit of Pope John Paul II with a show that featured Christ as a female mime, she stopped accepting their programming, despite their string-pulling and threats. When Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles issued a pastoral letter she thought watered down the Real Presence, she critiqued him, point-by-point, on television -- and refused to offer a false apology, even when Cardinal Mahony's machinations got her threatened with interdict (the loss of the Sacraments) and the closure of her community. When still other bishops tried to gain control of EWTN and stifle her loudly orthodox voice, she famously said, "I'll blow the damn thing up before you get your hands on it." Her eyes always focused on the eyes of her Beloved, she was almost blind to the worldly obstacles thrown in her way. She stepped right over them...

Link:

• A Most Diligent Mother: Angelica

Related:

• Cardinal Mahony 'stripped of duties' over sex abuse
• Card. Mahony’s next move? Deflect responsibility to Archbp. Gomez

Chance to be Ann Barnhardt's Obama "Billboard Neighbor"

Ann Barnhardt at barnhardt.biz needs a new neighbor for her Obama billboard:

"...Well, the billboard right beneath mine was leased by a local community college, and they got their panties in a twist about being so close to my 'extreme rhetoric', which in retrospect is hilarious. Dude, on the Barnhardt scale of rhetoric, 'Obama is a fraud. Demand resignation now' is about a 0.5 on the old volume dial, packing the heat of a glass of warm milk.

So, they demanded that their billboard be moved to another one of the company's locations, and the company, being very sympathetic to my cause and sentiments, gave me the right of first refusal on the now-abandoned billboard just beneath mine. So I grabbed that one, too. By this time, it was clear what Obama was, and so I kicked up the volume and heat...

The billboard company has agreed to let me see if there is anyone out there who would like to be my new 'billboard neighbor...'

So, some ideas might be a Catholic group wanting to put up a pro-life billboard, or a Divine Mercy billboard. Or an 'I WILL NOT COMPLY' billboard would be fantastic, too. Or a picture of Obama and Eric Holder with just the word TRAITORS. Something like that...

If you are interested, shoot me an email with an idea of what you would want to do and I'll put you in contact with my account rep at the billboard company. Communists need not apply! It really is a fun and satisfying way to exercise your First Amendment freedom!

Here's the pic. You would be replacing the TOP billboard." (continued)

Here are some ideas:

Happy 89th birthday Mother Angelica!

Raymond Arroyo: "On 89th, here is one of my favorite Mother quotes: 'I'm sure Our Lord asked a lot of people to build a network.  There has to be a reason that He chose a few nuns who didn't know anything, in the wrong state of life, with no money--because it goes against reason. Some people say I am a woman of great faith. I'm really a coward  who keeps moving forward."

• Chance to be Ann Barnhardt's Obama "Billboard Neighbor"

EWTN Sues HHS and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius To Stop Contraception Mandate

Irondale, AL (EWTN) – EWTN Global Catholic Network filed a lawsuit February 9 in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Alabama against the Department of Health & Human Services, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and other government agencies seeking to stop the imposition of the contraception mandate as well as asking the court for a declaratory judgment that the mandate is unconstitutional. EWTN is the first Catholic organization to file suit since the final HHS rules were published by the Obama administration on January 20, 2012.

"We had no other option but to take this to the courts," says EWTN President and CEO Michael P. Warsaw. "Under the HHS mandate, EWTN is being forced by the government to make a choice: either we provide employees coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs and violate our conscience or offer our employees and their families no health insurance coverage at all. Neither of those choices is acceptable."

The lawsuit was filed on EWTN's behalf by Mark Rienzi, Kyle Duncan, and Erik Kniffin from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

"We are taking this action to defend not only ourselves but also to protect other institutions – Catholic and non-Catholic, religious and secular – from having this mandate imposed upon them," Warsaw continued. "The government is forcing EWTN, first, to inform its employees about how to get contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs, a concept known as forced speech. To make the matter worse, the government then will force EWTN to use its donors' funds to pay for these same morally objectionable procedures or to pay for the huge fines it will levy against us if we fail to provide health care insurance. There is no question that this mandate violates our First Amendment rights. This is a moment when EWTN, as a Catholic organization, has to step up and say that enough is enough. Our hope is that our lawsuit does just that."

The Becket Fund previously filed similar lawsuits on behalf of Belmont Abbey College, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Belmont, N.C., and Colorado Christian University, an interdenominational Christian liberal arts university near Denver, which demonstrates that this is not just a Catholic issue. Both suits were filed prior to the HHS rules being finalized in January.

"When the government recently mandated that all private group health plans cover certain abortion drugs (namely, Plan B and ella), as well as related education and counseling, [our clients] knew that they could not obey both the government's mandate and their own religious convictions," said Rienzi, who focuses his practice at the Becket Fund on violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, free speech, and the free exercise of religion. "The mandate has been sharply criticized from across the political spectrum, and from religious leaders of a variety of faiths."

Duncan, a former Louisiana Solicitor General and General Counsel of the Becket Fund, said that without a change in the rules, EWTN could be forced to pay more than $600,000 for the "privilege" of not underwriting these services.

"This mandate is particularly hard on Catholics because Catholic organizations, such as hospitals, schools, social service agencies, media outlets and others, serve people regardless of their religious beliefs," Warsaw said. "We serve others not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic. "

EWTN Global Catholic Network, in its 30th year, is available in over 200 million television households in more than 140 countries and territories. With its direct broadcast satellite television and radio services, AM & FM radio networks, worldwide short-wave radio station, Internet website www.ewtn.com, electronic and print news services, and publishing arm, EWTN is the largest religious media network in the world.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is a non-profit, public-interest law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions. The Becket Fund has a 17-year history of defending religious liberty for people of all faiths. Its attorneys are recognized as experts in the field of church-state law, and they recently won a 9-0 victory against the federal government at the U.S. Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC.

Link:

• EWTN Sues U.S. Government To Stop Contraception Mandate

Related:

• Father John Zuhlsdorf and Canon Lawyer: Deny Communion to Pelosi
  
• Mitt Romney Told Catholic Hospitals to Administer Abortion Pills
• White House: Women ‘Deserve’ to Have Catholic Church Buy Them Sterilizations, Contraceptives and Abortifacients
• Pelosi on contraception insurance mandate: I am going to stick with my fellow Catholics in supporting the administration on this

h/t to Suzanne

Assisi & Hanceville

• Papal Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, (Photo Source)
• Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, (Photo Source)

OLAM Mass Changes - Mother Angelica

"A priest who violates either of these laws, is liable to suspension or removal of faculties." - The Most Reverend David Foley

Click here to play .mp3

Z-Chat Open

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/z-cam-%26-radio-sabina

New Blog: The Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration

"For God created man for incorruption, and made him in the Image of His own Eternity." - Wisdom 2:23

Less than a week before her first profession, Sr. Mary Veronica was crowned with flowers at an evening novitiate celebration which inaugurated her pre-profession retreat. Although by now the flowers of that wreath have faded and shriveled, they have been replaced by a different garment, and the time of retreat has given fresh vitality to our radiantly, committed new Junior Professed! July 22^nd dawned clear and was filled with all varieties of joys. We can’t help but marvel at how all the important details fell into place by the ever mysterious hand of Divine Providence. Muffins for guests had been baked, table decorations assembled and the duet Psalm response practiced...

 Read more at Image & Likeness 

• Black and White

h/t to The Crescat

Father Steven Scheier Describes his Near Death Experience on Mother Angelica Live

Quote

"I'm so tired of you, liberal Church in America."

-Mother Angelica on live TV
World Youth Day, August 14, 1993.

Painting: Mark Sanislo, Oil on Canvas, 36" x 32"

You and I Are Not the Eucharist, You and I Are Poor Sinners

Mother Angelica

"I gave my opinion, and it was rather strong. So this week, I received [a letter] from His Eminence Cardinal Mahony, and... he said, 'I must insist that you issue a formal public retraction of your statement, and that you assure your viewers that the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles does indeed fully believe in the Real Presence, and fosters devotion to this great mystery of our faith.'

Cardinal Mahony said "For you to state publicly on television that I do not believe in the Real Presence is astounding and reprehensible and calls for an immediate public clarification and apology from you.... I have just published a comprehensive pastoral letter on the celebration of Sunday Eucharist, and reprint at the very outset of the letter the formal statement of the Council of Trent on the full and authentic meaning of the Real Presence, a mystery of our Faith which I believe totally and without compromise....

"I do want to apologize to the Cardinal for my remark, which I'm sure seemed excessive... When I spoke those words last week I was expressing my heartfelt concern over the contents of this pastoral... I could hardly believe that I could make such a mistake if such a clear statement were right at the outset... I am confused at what the letter says....

"What came through to me was the principal focus in this letter on assembly, the concentration on assembly by the people in the Church rather than the Eucharist. So, I felt the letter was unclear to what the Church teaches about the Real Presence, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus..."

Mother Angelica noted that the only time she found the term "transubstantiation" was "in a very small footnote." She commented, "I don't know about you, but I don't read footnotes, unfortunately. I read the big print. So, I missed the footnote. Well, I kind of wish that footnote in the body of the letter was clear, and if I overlooked it in the whole letter, I imagine a lot of other people overlooked it.

"The pastoral letter has a whole different language... The word 'presence' is used in the text of the letter but it never says 'Real Presence'... it's a presence of the community, the assembly, the general presence of God in the liturgy, and the presence of the bishop. It doesn't talk about the presence of Jesus, Body, Blood, Soul, or the transubstantiation."

Mother Angelica said she found the pastoral letter's reference to Christ as "present in the simple gifts of bread and wine, and in the mystery that is His Church," particularly confusing:

"That the presence of Jesus is in the bread and wine, says to me, it's still bread and wine. It has to be changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. It can't be 'in'--that means it's still bread and wine, but He's inside. But He's inside of me... God is inside of everything... I'm a member of the masses; I'm a simple woman, and I don't understand this. Does that mean Christ is present before the Consecration in the bread and wine..? Or does it mean that He is present after the Consecration? Well, if He is present after the Consecration, in what way? Does He just kind of hop into the bread and wine, but it's still bread and wine? Or does it become His Body and Blood? The use of 'in the bread and wine' strongly suggested to me that the Body of Christ exists together with the bread and wine... Here's the bread and wine and here's Jesus... the Church rejects that misunderstanding... If there's still bread and wine, why would I adore Him? Why would I kneel and prostrate myself to bread and wine?

"Such an important letter opened a beautiful chance to explain to the people the Real Presence. The letter says 'What does it mean when the body of Christ comes forward to receive the Body of Christ?' Well, I don't know! And it was never answered in the letter... Am I the Body of Christ? No. And it looks like 'the body of Christ receives the Body of Christ.' [sigh] You know, I got a doctorate in theology, it' one of these they give you, I didn't earn it, but I still didn't know what it meant.

"Last week, I said if somebody taught me that, I would not obey. Well, the canons tell me I can't say that, that's a no-no, to tell anybody they should not obey their bishop or cardinal. For that, I apologize... It is very confusing to people when leaders seem to ignore the real problems in the Church that need to be addressed, seem to tolerate and encourage liturgical fuzziness and practices that don't, to me, show or manifest the holiness of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

"For example, the letter encourages parishioners to gather together around the altar, because 'what occurs there involves not only the bread and wine, but those standing round. Because we too, are consecrated, changed and shared.' I don't know what that means... So what does it really mean? There's no explanation... where can this innovation be found in the Church's teachings?..

"[U]nder the subtitle of 'Ministries' in this pastoral letter, it says, 'In our Catholic tradition the one who is called by the Church to the order of priest is to be in the local parish community as the presence of the Bishop'... 'The Bishop remains always for us in direct relationship to every parish in the diocese.' Very true. And sometimes we forget that. We shouldn't. 'He is also our bond with the Catholic Church through the world.' And that's true. 'But the bishop,' he says, 'since the early centuries of the Church, has laid hands on other worthy members' (I wasn't too sure who the other worthy members are--could they be women?) 'and sent them to be his presence in the community.' Do we say that our brothers have been ordained to be the presence of the bishop in this community? Maybe I've lived too long. I was taught as a kid that the Alter Christus was another Christ--otherwise, how could he forgive sins, or how could he say over this bread and wine, 'This is [my body]. He doesn't say 'his' body, he doesn't say 'the body, he says 'my body.'

"[Mahony] says, 'On Sunday the one who presides, the ordained priest, comes not only as other ministers do, from the assembly, and comes as one who orders this assembly, who relates this assembly to the bishop and the larger Church.' What does it mean? 'True to our Catholic soul, we understand our Church bonds to be more flesh and blood than theory and theology. Here in this human being is our bond with the bishop and with other communities throughout the world.' That one really confused me. I love our bishop here [in Birmingham, Alabama]. He's a wonderful bishop. He's been understanding, and you've got to be holy to be understanding of me. And I think he suffers much because of me. To him I apologize also. The Mass is the Holy Sacrifice of Jesus, and that sacrifice, the Father gives me and you the opportunity to be there. I love my bishop [but] I don't think I go to Mass every week to be bonded with my bishop.

"These are very difficult and confusing times, and personally I ask our Church leaders to give everybody that pastoral care, because I really cannot live my life as a Catholic if I don't know the truth. You and I must know the truth.

"[I]n this pastoral... the emphasis is definitely on the people. We are a people, you have a Church that has within it the presence of Jesus... We received at Baptism the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We didn't join a club, we didn't join a lounge. We became sons and daughters of the most high God.

"[The pastoral] says 'During the Eucharistic Prayer, the people see the way the Holy Spirit is invoked to transform these gifts and themselves'... are we saying that the people are the Eucharist, or the assembly is the Eucharist?

"His Eminence asked for a public clarification, and I wanted to say to him, I don't mean to cause you any problem. I don't mean to divide the Church and to cause anything. I'm just confused, because I don't understand.

"I have to send a copy of this to the nuncio because the cardinal sent him a copy, along with Archbishop Pilla, along with my own Bishop [Foley], God bless him. I hope he doesn't have a heart attack when he reads it. But I think he understands me. I'm not here to correct anybody... I'm not here to teach in the place of anybody, either. I know my place, and I try to keep it. But it is my duty, because the Lord has asked me, to enlighten the people.... just to say 'here, this is what the Church teaches...'

"I think all of us need to pray that we're not confused, that we know for sure what Jesus taught us, and that we're able through His grace to follow all of it. That we don't pick and choose, just take the whole thing... I think you and I need to pray for the Church all over the world, and that we all know our place. We're the people of God. We're the Church. But you and I are not Eucharist, you and I are poor sinners.

"And so I hope I satisfied the cardinal's request. I wish him well. I will pray for him, and I hope he will pray for me...

"We cannot afford not to know the truth about everything. So, Your Eminence, if I have mistaken your letter, I'm very sorry, but I still find it confusing... Let us pray for each other, and give the Lord the glory by all believing what the Church teaches..."

• Link
  

A Most Diligent Mother: Angelica

by John Zmirak

Leaving aside the popes, the person who has served as the public face of the Church in the United States for the past two decades is a little, crippled, chronically ill, old Italian-American lady who chats with Jesus daily, used to speak in tongues, and leaps before she looks. As I write this, she is quite ill, and we can't predict how long she will be with us. But the global media empire planted by this contemplative Poor Clare has put down mighty roots, with millions of viewers who love its dogged loyalty to the teachings of the Church. Indeed, in large swathes of the country where parishes have either closed or turned de facto Methodist, EWTN's broadcasts serve the isolated faithful like Allied broadcasts into Occupied Europe.

Given the crisis of faith of the 1970s and 1980s, building EWTN sometimes meant flouting the power of worldly bishops who'd learned more than golf tricks from their liberal Protestant colleagues. Indeed, too many clerics had soaked in the pastel, fuzzy uplift that for "mainline" denominations has largely replaced the Faith. By building without these gray men's by-your-leave a media operation that reached millions of the most devout and generous Catholics in the country, Mother Angelica did an end-run around the bureaucratic institutions that modernists had co-opted -- and built an enduring bridge between ordinary believers and the teaching office of Peter.

Born Rita Antoinette Rizzo to a fragile, fashionable mother and a worthless tom-catting father, she grew up desperately poor in a Mafia-infested Canton, Ohio. John Rizzo left her mother to fend for herself while Rita was still a toddler -- an abandonment from which Mrs. Mae Rizzo would never recover. (She would end up becoming the single most crochety nun in Mother Angelica's own community.) Marital meltdown wasn't taken for granted back then the way it is now; indeed, at my own Catholic school in the 1970s in New York, we all knew the one kid whose parents had gotten . . . divorced. And we felt bad for him -- a pity he flouted by learning to fistfight and becoming the neighborhood's best garage-band drummer. He kicked my butt more than once. (He was also Italian.) But I digress.

Or perhaps I don't. On a natural level, it just may have been the vicious scorn Pharisaical nuns poured on Rita in school for her father's sins and the sight of her mother slaving at odd jobs in the Depression that made Rita so beatifically implacable. Out of place at school, treated sternly by her mother's disappointed family, and afflicted with chronic abdominal pain that forced her as a teenager to wear a corset, Rita developed a rich inner life that more than made up for missing the Lindy Hop. Having heard of a home-bound lay mystic, Rhoda Wise, who bore the stigmata, Rita befriended her -- behavior that wasn't, in the 1940s, typical for a Midwestern teenager. Wise’s intercessory prayer led to the cure of Rita's debilitating illness and launched her on the road to a religious vocation. Scornful of the fidelity that men seemed to offer, Rita didn't get out much. As she told her biographer and longtime collaborator Raymond Arroyo:

"I was never a sexpot, and I never wanted a date. Sexually, I'm a eunuch. I could care less. It's just not my bag." (You can read Arroyo's moving, candid account of her life and struggles in his book Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles.)

Lest she sound frigid as opposed to chaste, Arroyo records the torrid, Mediterranean love affair of the adolescent Rita with the One she would eventually come to call her Spouse. After slogging through high school with middling grades, she went to work at Timken Roller Bearing Company, where she began introducing her true Love to others. There, Arroyo writes,

a picture of Jesus impaled by a crown of thorns sat on the edge of Rita's desk. When accused by a co-worker of "pushing her religion," Rita responded, "If you have a picture of a movie star or someone you love, you put it out there. Well, this is my love, and it's going to stay there."

Soon Rita realized she wished to wed the Man she loved. She applied to a strict Franciscan contemplative community -- and persevered despite a long list of obstacles that ranged from her rebellious personality to chronic knee pain that made it excruciating for her to join in communal prayer. (Mother Angelica would later write that in the convent her knees were like "two puffy water-filled grapefruit.") On Nov. 8, 1945, Rita Rizzo took her first vows as a religious, marking the occasion with a letter to her mother that reads like a wedding invitation.

Angelica would carry that conjugal conviction through the decades, living with an almost constant sense that Christ was her faithful, high-maintenance spouse. Intense reading in spiritual authors like St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection helped Sister Angelica school herself in radical trust. What's puzzling to us worldly folks is that this trust would only grow stronger in the face of suffering and disappointment. In an incident that Mother Angelica has retold hundreds of times to live and televised audiences, the young nun was cleaning the monastery floor with an unwieldy electronic polisher when the contraption got out of control -- injuring her so seriously that she would eventually need a full body cast and weeks of traction. No treatments helped very much, and Mother Angelica was left with chronic numbness and back pain, forced to wear a back brace just to get around.

Her response to this crippling event? She decided to found another monastery. For some time, sisters in her community had talked of creating an abbey that would pray for and minister to black Americans -- whose civil-rights activists were then being murdered and churches were being bombed. But no concrete plans had been made. So in her hospital bed, with no prospect of ever walking normally, Mother Angelica offered her Spouse what she calls her "outrageous bargain." Arroyo cites a letter she later wrote that laid it out:

A year ago when the doctors were doubtful that I would walk again, I turned to our Lord and promised that if he would grant me the grace to walk, I would do all in my power to promote a cloistered community among the Negroes. It would be dedicated to the Negro Apostolate by prayer, adoration, sacrifice, and union with God. It would ceaselessly make reparation for all the insults and persecutions the Negro race suffers and implore God's blessings and graces upon a people dear to the Heart of God.

While her healing was slow and incomplete, Mother Angelica didn't wait around to see if Christ was keeping up His end. With permission from her superior, she gathered other willing nuns to take up this unlikely mission with her in some hostile zone of the Bible Belt -- finally settling on an area just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Ironically, fear of actual violence would lead the new community to keep its mission of racial reparation a closely guarded secret. In the long run, the nuns would end up serving another persecuted minority -- faithful American Catholics.

Selected to head the new community, Mother Angelica would raise the money to build it and keep it running through a wide array of holy schemes -- from marketing fishing lures to Protestant anglers with promises of blessings from St. Peter, to roasting peanuts whose "nun-appeal" made them novelties at ballparks. In the end, the only reason the self-educated Angelica started writing books and recording religious tapes was to raise much-needed funds for her abbey. The popularity and profitability of the tapes soon led her to television, which she instantly grasped was the tool needed to "reach the masses." That was when her moxie came out. As Arroyo tells it:

When the local station she contracted to film her video series decided to air a movie denying the resurrection of Christ, Mother . . . blew her top. She insisted that the station drop the movie, or she would walk. The station manager got nasty, threatening that she'd "be off television permanently" if she left. "I don't need you, I only need God," Mother fired back. "I will build my own studio, buy my own cameras, and tape my own shows."

Coming from anyone else, this might have been a peevish boast, or empty threat. But Mother Angelica had come to see a pattern in her life: Faced with grinding pain and apparent futility, she would always respond with several steps, in this order:

1. Ask God His will in prayer.
2. Once she knew it, throw caution to the wind and trust that He would make her efforts fruitful.
3. Work like a madwoman, wheedling support from the uncertain and shunting aside doubters and dissenters who got in her way.
4. Rinse, repeat.

In other words, Mother Angelica would follow the Ignatian dictum to "pray as if all depended on God, and work as if all depended on you." While some tenured Jesuits may resent what Mother Angelica has said over the decades on her talk show -- and she's not one for undue tact -- they must appreciate how well she lives out this charism.

The source of Mother Angelica's Olympic-level diligence was the fiercely protective love a woman bears her husband -- especially when he suffers innocently for others. She couldn't bear to see her Beloved mocked, and she wouldn't stand idly by. So when that network flippantly questioned the Resurrection, she did found her own network. When U.S. bishops greeted a visit of Pope John Paul II with a show that featured Christ as a female mime, she stopped accepting their programming, despite their string-pulling and threats. When Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles issued a pastoral letter she thought watered down the Real Presence, she critiqued him, point-by-point, on television -- and refused to offer a false apology, even when Cardinal Mahony's machinations got her threatened with interdict (the loss of the Sacraments) and the closure of her community. When still other bishops tried to gain control of EWTN and stifle her loudly orthodox voice, she famously said, "I'll blow the damn thing up before you get your hands on it." Her eyes always focused on the eyes of her Beloved, she was almost blind to the worldly obstacles thrown in her way. She stepped right over them.

Mother Angelica has flouted powerful men, the conventional wisdom, and the voice of prudence so many times that for her it's almost routine. Her intimate contact with Christ has helped her to keep, in the midst of outrageous success and mounting power, the simplicity of her founders -- Francis and Clare. What drew her to those saints, Mother Angelica has said, was "their absolute dependence on the providence of God. They saw him in all. And what they undertook was not planned by them, but through their love and detachment they fit into whatever was happening in the present."

It takes a broadly Catholic imagination to see the strand connecting the threadbare life of St. Francis to the basilicas, hospitals, and colleges built in his name. Likewise we won't know till Judgment Day how many conversions, "reversions," vocations, and deepened lives of faith can be traced to Mother Angelica's influence. And that's just as well, since she'd never take the credit, attributing all her successes to Providence rather than personality. That said, it helped that Mother Angelica knew how to hornswoggle Baptists into laying free pipe for nuns, to charm the socks off jaded cable-TV execs, bend the ears of visiting cardinals, and impress the pope. She worked without ceasing, except to pray. It's hard to imagine that she will ever rest, even in Heaven. Perhaps those with really high-end satellite dishes will someday be able to tune into "Eternal Life with Mother Angelica."

• Link

A Threat from Within [EWTN, Mother Angelica, & the USCCB]

By Raymond Arroyo

Word had reached EWTN that Mother was being derided as a schismatic, "a proud and disobedient nun" acting in defiance of the bishops. Bill Steltemeier and others believed that the statements originated not with the bishops themselves but with officials at the United States Catholic Conference, the bishops' bureaucratic entity in Washington, D.C., piloted by clerics and laymen.

Tension between Mother Angelica and the bishops conference was inevitable. The same year she founded EWTN, the U.S. bishops launched their own foray into cable television: the Catholic Telecommunications Network of America.

CTNA was a for-profit satellite-distribution network chartered to provide Catholic programming to diosceses around the country. At the time, it was the most expensive project ever undertakn by the bishops, carrying a price tag of $4.5 million in start-up costs alone. Through the sale of specialized services like teleconferencing, and by levying an annual five-thousand-dollar fee on network affiliated, CTNA intended to be self-sustaining in three years' time. Where EWTN went directly to viewers via cable, CTNA could be seen only by local bishops - or at least those bishops willing to expend capital on a receiving dish.

Getting 370 bishops to agree on magisterial teaching was difficult enough, but getting them to agree on what constituted Catholic programming was nearly impossible. To resolve the impass, the bishops created a gatekeeper system, whereby they could individually control programming decisions. Diocesan affiliated received the daily CTNA feed; then the local bishop would determine which if any programming merited broadcast on his station.

"It was a flawed design from the start," Father Robert Bonnot, who later became president and CEO of CTNA, told me. "The irony of it was they were concerned about gatekeeping their own network, and here was this nun in Alabama who could care less what the bishops wanted to have happen. Clearly, she was going out and doing what she needed to do to get on cable systems. CTNA was not free to do that.

The running the bishop's network quickly realized that cable was the place to be, but Mother Angelica was already there. She ewas "the Catholic personality on the scene, much more than the bishops" in the opinion of Father Bonnot. This prominence diverted potential CTNA resources to EWTN and established a Catholic center of power and influence independent of the bishops' conference, fueling animosity. Privately, Mother and those in her camp feared CTNA's entery into the cable arena. After all, how many Catholic networks would the marketplace support or tolerate?

Publicly, Angelica dismised what she called the "grossly exaggered" rivarly between the two networks. "[CTNA] is a diocesan network [beaming] directly to dioceses - programs are scrambled for an exclusive audience," she told the Los Angeles Times. "Our programs are free and go directly to the people in their homes. It's like comparing the Los Angeles Times to the candy shop."

Acknowledged or not, the rivarly existed and battle lines formed. In the Summer of 1981, a full year before CTNA actually began broadcasting, Richard Hirsh, the secretary of communications for the bishops conference, suggested in an interview that EWTN represented a "needless duplication" of Catholic media efforts. He went on to lament the fact that there was "no official contact with [Mother Angelica' whatsoever."

"I have absolutely no problem with the bishops," Angelica explained to a reporter. "I do not feel obligated to render an account to the USCC which is a lay entity." Announcing her network plans, she wrote a letter directly to every bishop in the United States, asking them to suggest activities in your diocese that you would like to see broadcast on EWTN." Flouting the bishops' bureacratic apparatus in Washington did not exactly endear the nun to the USCC staff. One anonymous USCC cleric opined in the Catholic press, "Cloistered nuns should stay in their monasteries and not get involved in stuff like this."

From Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles by Raymond Arroyo

• Bishops’ meeting not on EWTN
• EWTN's response on not providing Telecare feed on USCCB Meeting
• Liturgical translation drama at the USCCB. Is it finally over?
• Just tuning in
• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
• Eternal Word Television Network, Global Catholic Network
• Raymond Arroyo - Eternal Word Television Network: Blog
• Pope Awards Highest Honor to EWTN Founder Mother Angelica
  
• Nun: Archbishop [Weakland] can put his head in the toilet
  

Mother Angelica

On August 15, 2009 the solemnity of the Assumption, Mother Angelica will celebrate her 65th Anniversary in Religious Life! We are looking forward to this monumental occasion! For so many years we have been edified as many of the EWTN family have sent Mother their prayers and best wishes for her special day. Thank you for all your prayers for Mother Angelica. As we make a novena in preparation for the Assumption, know that you will be in our prayers.



From The Sisters at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery on July 20th, 2009