The Audacity of Mother Angelica

EDITORIAL: God chose her as his spouse, and that made all the difference.

(photo: EWTN photo)

Abandoned by her father and raised by a mother who struggled with depression, Rita Antoinette Rizzo’s childhood resembled a grim endurance test made worse by the poor health that would plague her for most of her life.

Surely, Rita was a most unlikely foundress of a global television network accessible to hundreds of millions of households.

Those who place all their trust in five-year plans cooked up by business consultants would likely dismiss Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation’s source of strength — an unequivocal dependence on divine Providence.

“Audacity was her strategy,” noted Mother Angelica’s obituary in The Wall Street Journal. “Se embarked on projects — whether building monasteries or TV studios — before lining up the funding and expertise.

“A poster in her print shop read: ‘We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re getting good at it.’ She relied on God as her mentor and venture capitalist.”

Her improbable life reveals the confounding mystery of God’s will. In the history of the Church, it is the poor, the frail and the feisty who do his bidding and so move mountains.

As Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia noted in a statement released after Mother Angelica’s death, the U.S. bishops had poured millions of dollars into a cable-television initiative that never got off the ground. Instead, a cloistered Poor Clare nun in the Bible Belt set things in motion with a simple prayer of petition during a visit to a Chicago television studio.

“I walked in, and it was just a little studio, and I remember standing in the doorway and thinking, ‘It doesn’t take much to reach the masses,’” Mother Angelica told The New York Times in a 1989 interview. “I just stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Lord, I’ve got to have one of these.’”

At times, that feisty streak could get Mother Angelica into trouble with Church leaders, and in a special tribute on page 12, Father Raymond de Souza examines the nature of her audacity and suggests that EWTN’s foundress had much in common with the great Catholic women who founded hospitals, schools and charities in this land and abroad.

“Mother Angelica was both orthodox in doctrine and traditional in practice,” observed Father de Souza. “She was a mulier fortis (strong woman), belonging to a long line of religious women who were pioneers in apostolic creativity and boldness. That’s a traditional role for religious women, even when — or especially when — it puts them at odds with bishops,” he continued, as he recalled St. Catherine of Siena’s legacy.

The power and immediacy of modern media brought Mother Angelica’s disputes with Church leaders to the notice of ordinary Catholics. But her energies were primarily focused on her audience, encouraging spiritual growth, making the Mass available to the homebound and clarifying the truths of the Catholic faith during a time of confusion and alienation.

“At its best, our age is an age of searchers and discoverers; and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily,” observed Flannery O’Connor, the 20th-century Catholic writer.

Her own troubled childhood might have set Mother Angelica on a path to despair, as well. But God chose her as his spouse, and that made all the difference.

For three decades, heavy, painful braces encased and stabilized her legs and back. But her infirmities kept her spiritually grounded, close to the Lord and attuned to the hidden sorrows that beset her audience.

“Only in eternity shall we see the beauty of the soul, and only then shall we realize what great things were accomplished by interior suffering,” she said.

In our time, faith is often dismissed as a convenient crutch that frees the believer from engaging with reality and making one’s own choices. But the only crutches she employed were the sticks that propped up her body, helping her get to church, reach her office and television studio and travel the world to expand the reach of EWTN.

On pages 11-14 in this issue of the Register, a special section celebrates this remarkable woman’s path of Christian discipleship. But Mother Angelica’s story and recent news headlines remind us of the many other “strong women” who serve the Church today, in schools and monasteries, hospitals and missions.

Among them are the Little Sisters of the Poor, who filed a legal challenge to the Health and Human Services’ mandate. Just days after the March 23 oral arguments in their case, which has been consolidated with six other lawsuits, the justices issued an unusual order directing the government and the plaintiffs to propose fresh solutions to resolve the litigation.

The deadline for the new proposals is April 20, with no guarantee that a resolution will be forthcoming. But the Little Sisters’ supporters can be sure of one thing: They will only approve a plan that allows them and other religious nonprofits the freedom to serve without violating their deeply held beliefs.

Yet it is a testament to our nation’s shifting priorities that the Little Sisters’ stand has provoked a slew of hostile media coverage. A recent Washington Post profile of Little Sister of the Poor Constance Veit was openly skeptical, even contemptuous, of her concerns about the mandate.

Following a visit to the Little Sisters’ home in Washington, the Post’s story described Sister Constance’s tender moments with elderly residents, but expressed a measure of shock when she offered strong objections to the mandate.

“The gentle caregiver at the nursing floor becomes a crusader,” read the story. “She cites facts and figures. She decries those who oppose her.”

It would appear that the Post’s reporter has little experience with the strong women who have built and staffed the Church’s apostolates. A spiritual mother will be tender with her children, but she will defend her family’s right to live by the truth. The two positions are complementary, not opposed.

Likewise, news headlines have drawn our attention and prayers to the women who are beacons of courage amid religious persecution, including the four Missionaries of Charity in Yemen who died at the hands of Islamic State militants.

The four women had survived wartime violence in Yemen only to face a new campaign by the Islamic State to eradicate Christianity from the region. The sisters knew the danger they faced, but remained at the order’s residence at Aden, serving the elderly and the disabled. “Because of their faithfulness, they were in the right place at the right time and were ready when the Bridegroom came,” said one Missionary of Charity after the massacre.

Mother Angelica lived in a monastery far from the violence of war and terrorism, though her network — along with EWTN’s other news outlets, like the Register — has shone a spotlight on the persecution of Christians and echoed Pope Francis’ call for an international response.

Further, her own message of spiritual conversion was injected with a powerful sense of urgency designed to unsettle a complacent world. “We cannot put off a change of life for tomorrow or old age,” she warned, “for there may be no tomorrow.”

There is real audacity in the words of this spiritual mother. She never walked away from a fight for souls, even when her body threatened to fail her. This is the audacity of a bride of Christ.

Requiescat in pace.

 

EWTN photo