When Mother Angelica decided to set up a Catholic television network in 1981, the obstacles were considerable. Her monastery, Our Lady of the Angels in Alabama, would be the first ever to gain a broadcasting licence. There was nowhere to put a TV studio: she had to halt the building of a new garage and expand the foundations. And the grand total of available funding was $200.
But Mother Angelica thought that obstacles were only to be expected. “Faith,” she once said, “is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach.”
When Mother Angelica died on Easter Sunday, surrounded by her Poor Clare Sisters at that same monastery, Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) had become the world’s biggest religious media network, reaching, by its own estimate, 230 million homes in more than 140 countries. It is something of a mystery how she managed it.
The answer may have something to do with Mother Angelica’s character. Born in 1920, she was raised by her mother from the age of six after her father abandoned them. The economic crash coincided with her mother’s depression; they barely survived those years, which played a part in Mother Angelica’s later resilience, her trust in providence and her belief that suffering could be turned to good.
The theologian Janet E Smith observes that some of Mother Angelica’s values were shared by a generation. “My parents grew up in the same era as Mother Angelica, and, much like her, were poor,” Smith tells me. “They learned to work hard, not to complain or be self-pitying, to be happy with little, not to live beyond their means and to be grateful for everything. They had a strong sense of duty, of right and wrong, and of the importance of keeping their promises.”
Those qualities were integral to Mother Angelica’s achievement. Her no-nonsense style was appealing because it was so authentic: the viewer suspected that she was harder on herself than on anyone else. “When she was reasonably sure God told her to do something, she just did it,” says the writer Jennifer Fulwiler.
In the confidence that she had been called to do this work, Mother Angelica threw herself into expanding and improving the network. Having begun with reruns and a rather eclectic programme, it became a more focused operation, which eventually included the National Catholic Register newspaper, the Catholic News Agency, a radio station and a website which is packed with useful resources.
Smith adds that EWTN’s confidence and fidelity to Church teaching, in the uncertain atmosphere of the past 30 years, were a major part of its appeal. “Mother Angelica had a clear strong message when the Church was dominated by dissent and confusion.”
EWTN was unashamedly Catholic and it concentrated on the supernatural, promoting the rosary, the Mass, the saints, while affirming unfashionable teachings. It spoke to an appetite in the laity which perhaps the hierarchy didn’t quite sense. The author George Weigel remarks: “Mother Angelica created a global media presence for the Church and the faith; Church bureaucracies have consistently failed to do that. There is a lesson there.”
Mother Angelica showed how much could be done by a Catholic woman, and one working mostly outside the structures of the Church. She cut across the expectations of Catholics – but also of non-Catholics. In the film Desire of the Everlasting Hills, which follows the life stories of three gay Catholic converts, one, Paul, remembers switching on the TV and seeing a nun wearing an eyepatch. (This was in 2001, when Mother Angelica had recently suffered a stroke.)
An atheist at the time, Paul thought it was hilarious – a pirate nun! He burst out laughing and then, just before changing the channel, he heard her say: “God created you and I to be happy in this life and the next. He cares for you, he watches your every move. There’s no one that loves you that can do that.” It stopped him in his tracks. He became a compulsive viewer and, not long after, entered the Church.
Many people have had their lives changed by Mother Angelica and the network she founded. Her explanation of its unlikely success was the simplest of all, and the hardest to dispute.
“It shows all the wonders of God’s providence,” she told a caller to an EWTN phone-in who asked about the station’s origins. “Unbelievable providence. He wanted this network for you in these serious times.”
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