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HTM010: In 1942 or 1943 — sources disagree on the year — a nineteen-year-old in Canton, Ohio, doubled over with a stomach pain no doctor could name, prayed a novena to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. The pain left and never came back. Rita Rizzo promised to spend her life spreading devotion to the Little Flower, and she kept that promise for more than seventy years.

Dom Bettinelli tells the story of Mother Angelica, the Poor Clare nun who founded EWTN. She grew up poor, fatherless and half forgotten in a rough mill town, and in 1944 she boarded a bus for Cleveland and entered a cloistered monastery without saying goodbye in person to the mother she had half raised.

A fall from an electric floor scrubber wrecked her spine, and the night before surgery she made God an offer: let her walk, and she would build Him a monastery in the American South. So the nuns of Canton made fishing lures. Hand-tied, packaged in the convent and sold by mail to sportsmen, St. Peter’s Fishing Lures paid for fifteen acres in Irondale, Alabama, where Our Lady of the Angels Monastery was dedicated in 1962.

Then, in 1978, a visit to a Christian television station in Chicago changed everything. With $200 and a garage, twelve cloistered nuns, and no experience at all, she put the Eternal Word Television Network on the air on August 15, 1981. Her call-in show, “Mother Angelica Live,” made her the most unfiltered voice in American Catholic broadcasting.

That voice got her into trouble. After World Youth Day 1993 in Denver, her on-air denunciation of a mimed Stations of the Cross with a woman portraying Christ drew a furious response from Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and she refused the bishops’ request to pull the segment. In 1997 she told viewers her obedience to Cardinal Roger Mahony‘s liturgical directives “would be absolutely zero.” Six days later, she apologized for her tone on the same show — and kept her theology.

The real hinge came in 2000. With a Vatican visitation raising questions about who owned the network, she handed control of EWTN to a lay board rather than gamble the mission on winning a fight with Rome. A year later, strokes took most of her ability to speak, and the woman who had spent her public life talking spent her last fourteen years in near silence before the Blessed Sacrament. She died on Easter Sunday, 2016.

No cause for her canonization has been opened. But her story leaves a question for anyone sure of what they believe: when God asks for the wheel back, will you let go?

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Links for this episode:

• Wikipedia — Mother Angelica
• Arlington Catholic Herald — Mother Angelica’s early years: a religious awakening born in the streets of Canton
• ChurchPOP — How a 20th-Century Mystic Led Mother Angelica to Miraculous Healing Through St. Therese of Lisieux
• EWTN — Mother Angelica’s Life
• National Catholic Register — Mother Angelica’s Monastery at 50: Southern Hospitality Meets Divine Providence
• Encyclopedia of Alabama — Mother Angelica
• National Catholic Register — Mother Angelica’s EWTN Marks 45 Years: From Garage Studio to Global Reach
• Wikipedia — EWTN
• Aleteia — 20 Memorable One-Liners from Mother Angelica
• Fr. Z’s Blog — From the Archive: 1993, When Mother Angelica EXPLODED!
• Religion News Service — Cardinal Mahony, Mother Angelica in Flap Over Liturgical Changes
• Catholic League — The Odyssey of Mother Angelica
• The Boston Globe — Mother Mary Angelica, 92, Founded Catholic TV Network
• Catholic World Report — EWTN Remembers Mother Angelica, 10 Years After Her Death
• Patheos, Catholic Bard — On The Road To Blessed Sainthood

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