Cardinal George Pell celebrated a Mass in memory of Mother Angelica, foundress of the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), in Rome on March 27. The Mass, at the Church of Santo Spirito in Sassia, near the Vatican, marked the sixth anniversary of her death in 2016.
From the Australian cardinal’s homily:
….Rita Rizzo was born poor into a family in the Rust Belt of Ohio. Her father abandoned her when she was five and she was brought up by her mother, who unfortunately suffered from depression. She didn’t do well in school, but she was the drum majorette in the school band, which of course doesn’t come as a surprise….
I am not sure that Mother Angelica ever underwent a radical conversion, growing up with the faith as she did and entering the convent as a young woman. From that time at least, you could say that she went from strength to strength very much in a straight line….
Mother Angelica moved mountains. She was a strong woman with an aggressive nature, sharpened by her environment and upbringing, which she controlled well and she used to marvelous effect….
It was love and devotion to Christ which provoked Mother’s most famous and controversial denunciation in 1993, after a female Christ figure was presented [in the Stations of the Cross] at the Denver World Youth Day. It was a searing and prophetic indictment. It was a bit over the top and the end result of years of insults and provocation.
I remember reading it and concluding that whatever might be said of the language, her point was basically correct. She was right. An Australian Catholic activist told me that speech changed the direction of his life….
The above comes from a March 29 story on the site of the Catholic News Agency.
Love Mother Angelica. The EWTN network is a Divine gift.
EWTN is dying because the demographic that watches that channel is dying. Invalid Baby Boomers holed up in their homes. EWTN won’t last much longer than another ten years, if that.
Eventually, cable, satellite and streaming companies will refuse to include EWTN as part of their packages.
Both demographic collapse and corporate cancellation will doom EWTN.
EWTN radio? Almost nobody listens to it.
Uh, did you see that on CNN?
It’s just the resident troll, poor thing.
Why do you say, “Eventually, cable, satellite and streaming companies will refuse to include EWTN as part of their packages?”
The Home Shopping Networks (2), CNN, the Golf Channel, Animal Planet, MTV, the Baby Channel, the Knitting Channel and others are still around.
The bishops network, though, did not make it. Catholic Telecommunications Network of America was an American Catholic television network that existed from 1982 to 1994. It was sponsored by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which spent $30 million on the network.
As Mark Twain never said, but is famously quoted as saying, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
(Kind of like something Saint Francis never said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words when necessary.” He did tell his men, “Preach the Gospel with your deeds.”)
Gotta go! The grandkids want to watch EWTN’s Kids Faith Adventures! I’ve got my glass of prune juice by my recliner, but still looking for that remote!
She was not afraid to proclaim and live out her Catholic faith, an example to us all.
The church of the Holy Spirit where Cardinal Pell spoke was appointed to to be the location of the Divine Mercy Spirituality Center in 1994, located right next to Santo Spirito Hospital.
Time to stop watching FOXNews now too because it just hired Bruce Jenner as a commentator and is pretending he’s a woman named Caitlyn.
Good. Faux news rots brains.
I do not have time right now to read all the article, but I remember that video that Mother Angelica made when it first came out. Now many, many years later, the film is fading but what she said is as true as ever. God bless her! She “never missed a beat”, and nothing she said was “over the top” as far as I am concerned. She hit the bullseye.
May Mother Angelica, through the mercy of God, rest in peace, and if she is already with the Lord she so loved and served, may she pray for my family and me.
Mother Angelica truly loved Jesus and stood up for Jesus from corrupt Catholic Bishops and any other so called Catholic who did not live their faith fully , including even those ordained to the priesthood.
EWTN is not the same since her passing, the corrupt church of nice crowd have taken over, except for maybe Raymond Arroyo’s program.
Mother Angelica also called out Cardinal Mahoney for a badly written pastoral letter on the Eucharist.
Mahoney tried to sabotage her network by going to the United Stated Catholic Bishop’s Conference and partnered with his cronies there to destroy her.
He was unsuccessful
Thanks be to God Almighty.
Raymond Arroyo is creepy and arrogant, and his guests frequently disparage Pope Francis.
Why doesn’t he cite her having to apologize to Mahony for slander?
Why would an Australian Cardinal, a victim of much more than a public insult (being wrongly imprisoned), bring up something that happened almost 25 years ago?
What did she actually say on her Nov. 12, 1997 program?
The LA Times didn’t characterize it as slander. And, appropriately, she did apologize, according to the LA Times.
When Raymond Arroyo was interviewing Mother Angelica for the biography he wrote about her, at one point he asked her thoughts about the future of EWTN. “Nothing lasts forever, honey” was her reply.