Two articles which were accidentally omitted from our November/ December 1997 issue on Good News appear in this feature section. Mother Angelica’s miraculous cure is not mentioned here, but that recent event makes the appearance of this piece all the more timely. — Editor

Any time is a good time to celebrate the work of Mother Angelica. Her most visible apostolic endeavor is EWTN global television network, which is good news for 50 million households in the United States alone, and many more overseas. Short-wave radio network WEWN, recently made available on AM/FM, and an Internet supersite round out her apostolate, which is becoming the new gold standard in religious broadcasting.

God has bestowed a richer blessing through the labors of Mother Angelica: the flourishing of the religious communities that she herself has founded. In 1962, she built Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, using money raised from selling fishing lures. Her community of sisters is an autonomous monastery of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration (P.C.P.A.), an order founded in Paris, France on the exact day that Pius IX promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Like so many modern orders, adoration of Jesus in the tabernacle is a central part of their spiritual life.

Like St. Francis of Assisi, who founded the Poor Clares many centuries ago, preaching to the multitudes has come naturally to the nuns at Our Lady of the Angels. In the early 1970s they began printing Mother Angelica’s writings using their own press, built and financed from scratch.

Mother Angelica was soon discovered as a TV star, and by the late 1970s she hosted two shows on the Christian cable network, CBN. A local TV studio was provided to Mother Angelica as the site to tape her shows, until that fateful day when the station manager decided to air a blasphemous film, The Word. When he absolutely refused to yank the program, Mother Angelica declared that she would neither sign a contract with his station, nor continue to use his studio. Never mind that no other studios existed within 100 miles. In a moment of heated resolve, Mother Angelica declared that she would build her own studio, buy her own equipment, and tape her own shows! Eternal Word Television Network was born. The Poor Clare sisters eagerly set about turning the garage into a studio, and Mother Angelica procured her own satellite. Their meager resources of $200 were multiplied as donations poured in from around the country.

By 1987, EWTN had outgrown both the garage and the community’s resources. The apostolate was so large that Mother Angelica instituted an order of priests and brothers, the Missionaries of the Eternal Word, who are totally devoted to evangelization using state-of-the-art media technology. More important, she established them to offer Mass and give the Sacraments to the Poor Clares and the frequent visitors at the Monastery.

What accounts for the flourishing of Mother Angelica’s two apostolates- the religious communities and the mission through the airwaves? She is a great believer in what she calls "the theology of risk". She says, "Every thing today revolves around feasibility studies. Just suppose Jesus had decided to do a feasibility study on whether or not He should have chosen those twelve apostles."

Risk, going out on a limb to do God’s work, is not to be understood as rashness. Mother Angelica’s risky entrepreneurial and foundational ventures have always been grounded in a strong sense of union with Christ, her spouse. On the occasion of professing her vows in 1947, she sent a wedding invitation to her mother, signed "Jesus and Angelica". Indeed, the raising of Our Lady of the Angels deep in the Bible Belt was the fruit of a promise she made to her Spouse during her young years in the convent. When Sister Angelica was injured in a freak accident as she scrubbed floors with an unwieldy scrubbing machine, she was told she had a 50/50 chance of never walking again. She prayed and promised Jesus that if she could walk again she would build Him a monastery, and one in the South, at that!

Mother Angelica is a role model of risk-taking in these days when the Holy Father has asked us to shout the Gospel from the rooftops. She is also an important example to a needy and growing group— the children of broken homes. Rita Rizzo, the child who would become Mother Angelica, suffered the absence of her father from earliest memory and the trauma of divorce when only six years old. She and her mother, Mae Rizzo, though innocent, suffered poverty and ostracism as a result. Mother Angelica recalls the sewer rats in their apartment and the gigantic holes in her shoes. Because of her faith Mae Rizzo resisted the thought of remarriage, knowing all along this would have brought financial security. She kept up her struggling dry-cleaning business, where Rita would become a delivery driver at the age of eleven. Amidst this hardship, Rita turned to God. To this day she credits divine favor for her inexplicable recovery from an abdominal ailment as a girl. Rita also learned to be aggressive in asking for what she needed. She it was who would find her mother the job that would alleviate their strict poverty.

Surely the entrepreneurial spirit in Mother Angelica could have propelled her to Wall Street or the boardrooms of the best corporations. After a childhood of extreme poverty, she chose a life of detachment and dependence on God, rather than choosing to aggrandize wealth using her own wits. Her mother would later join the community at Our Lady of the Angels, and live in prayer and thanksgiving until her death. God has certainly blessed Mother Angelica, her mother— and millions of TV watchers and radio listeners— a hundred-fold.