TV Picks 09.06.09-09.12.09

VARIOUS


New Series Debuts

EWTN At 8 p.m. Saturdays, EWTN Cinema will air lives of the saints and Catholic dramas. At 6 a.m. daily, EWTN Original Productions will portray the Catholic world. At 5:30 p.m. Sundays, Forgotten Heritage: Europe and the Eucharist will explain how faith in the Eucharist has shaped Western culture.

At 11 a.m. Sundays, A Light for All Nations analyzes Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations), the constitution on the Church. At 5 p.m. Sundays, St. Josemaria Escrivá and Opus Dei discusses St. Josemaria Escrivá (1902-1975) and Opus Dei, the personal prelature he founded in 1928. At 1 p.m. Wednesdays, Theater of the Word presents hour-long plays with Catholic and scriptural themes.


SUNDAY, 11:30 a.m.


Weekly Papal Audience

CATHOLICTV This weekly Centro Televisivo Vaticano program airs Pope Benedict XVI’s latest Wednesday audience. He usually gives a message, greets pilgrims and imparts his apostolic blessing, which includes relatives, friends and religious items.


MONDAY, 3 a.m., 6:30 p.m.


A Day With Mother Teresa

EWTN Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta discusses her Missionaries of Charity, the Church and politics as she answers questions at a conference sponsored by the Institute on Religious Life in Chicago in 1981.


TUESDAY, 9 p.m.


Yellowstone: Land to Life

PBS The two years’ worth of filming in this new documentary from John Grabowska charts Yellowstone National Park’s geological history, including its glaciers, mountains and volcanic caldera, and the landscape’s relationship to the local wildlife. TV-G.


TUESDAY, 10 p.m.


Primetime

ABC Tonight’s first news segment profiles a program in which Colorado convicts learn gentle ways to acclimate captured mustangs to human contact, and the horses, once adopted, help troubled teenagers and disabled children. The second segment follows mentally ill people who claim a “right” to refuse anti-psychotic medications.


FRIDAY, 10 p.m.


Hotel Ground Zero

HISTORY Premiering tonight after a full day of 9/11 shows, this hour-long special tells the true story of the Marriott WTC Hotel, situated below and between the World Trade Center towers, and the 940 people who were inside it during the 9/11 terror attack. Victims and rescuers alike displayed great courage. Advisory: TV-PG.


SATURDAY, 5 p.m., 8 p.m.


American Beaver

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL Near Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains, a 40-pound beaver fends off predators and fights the weather as she busily builds a dam. She is the most important animal in her area because her dam and the pond it creates will affect the land itself and the lives of the other animals nearby. Advisory: TV-PG.

Dan Engler writes from

Santa Barbara, California.