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MOTHER ANGELICA

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hideThis article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. (February 2025)This article’s tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. (February 2025)
The Reverend MotherMary AngelicaPCPA
BornRita Antoinette Rizzo
April 20, 1923
Canton, Ohio, U.S.
DiedMarch 27, 2016 (aged 92)
Hanceville, Alabama, U.S.
Other namesMary Angelica of the Annunciation
OccupationReligious sister
Known forFounding EWTN
Notable creditMother Angelica Live (1983–2001)[1][2]

Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation PCPA[3] (born Rita Antoinette Rizzo; April 20, 1923 – March 27, 2016), commonly referred to as Mother Angelica, was an American Roman Catholic nun of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. She was most widely known for the television show Mother Angelica Live. She founded the international broadcast cable television network Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), which is purported to be “the world’s largest religious media network”. She also founded the radio network WEWN, a radio network utilized by members of the Catholic Church as a means to spread their beliefs.

In 1981, Angelica started broadcasting religious programs from a converted garage in Birmingham, Alabama. Over the next 20 years, she developed a media network that included radio, TV, and internet channels as well as print media. Angelica hosted shows on EWTN until 2001 when she had a stroke. She continued to live in the cloistered monastery in Hanceville, Alabama, until she died in 2016.[4]

Early life

[edit]

Mother Angelica was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo on April 20, 1923, in Canton, Ohio,[5] a small town with a large immigrant population known for its steel production.[6] Though the majority of the town was considered pleasant, Rita was born in southeast Canton, which was known as its red-light district or “the slums”.[6] The area was home to both Black Americans and large numbers of Italian immigrants who worked in the Canton Mills.[6] The area’s Italian immigrants faced issues with social mobility, confined by levels of illiteracy and financial tributes demanded by the Black Hand, a criminal organization with Sicilian roots.[7] There was significant prostitution and corruption, and mob violence was common. The Catholic priests at the local St Anthony’s Church attempted to encourage a better life for the area’s population.[7]

Of an Italian-American background, Rita was the only child of John Rizzo, a tailor, and Mae Helen Rizzo (née Gianfrancesco). Rita was born at 1029 Liberty, the home of her maternal grandparents Mary and Anthony Gianfresco.[7] Mae, a striking woman with good looks and a sense for fashion, married John at age 22, against the advice of her parents, who disliked him.[8][9]

John, who had never wanted a child, was enraged upon discovering that Mae was pregnant.[10] Rita was baptised at the age of five months; Mae carried her to the side altar of Our Lady of Sorrows and handed Rita over.[11] John, unable to make a living, rented a roach-infested house for his family, leading Mae to scold him and stay with her parents for the night, which became a regular pattern.[11] The couple’s marital issues were worsened when Mae invited John’s mother, Catherine Rizzo, to stay, who was very critical of Mae.[12] John had abandoned the family by November 1929, moving to California and dropping contact with Mae and Rita entirely.[13][14] Mae and the five-year-old Rita had to move to the crowded Gianfresco home.[15]

Rita’s maternal grandfather Anthony Gianfresco had emigrated from Naples, Italy to Colorado, before moving to Ohio and marrying Mary Votolato.[15] Mother Angelica remembered her grandfather providing Italian newcomers with clothes and helping them find work, and her grandmother feeding them.[15] On March 10, 1931, her mother was granted custody of her, and her father was ordered to pay five dollars a week in child support.[16] Her mother only received “intermittent” child-support payments from John.[17] While maintaining full custody, her mother struggled with chronic depression and poverty.[18] This was in part due to the social stigma of being a divorcée, and because opportunities for a woman to provide for herself were limited, especially during the height of the Great Depression.[16]

Between 1933 and 1937, following disagreements with her brothers, Mae moved with Rita to a series of run-down one-bedroom apartments, where the front end was used for business, and the back was reserved for sleeping.[16] At times, if she had fallen out with her mother, Rita would stay with family friends.[16] The pair were forced to return to Rita’s grandparents due to financial pressures.[19] Matters were complicated when her grandfather, Anthony Gianfrancesco, suffered a stroke in their absence, which paralyzed him on one side and required him to use a cane.[20]

Looking back at her childhood, Mother Angelica described herself and her mother as being “like a pair of refugees”:[14] “We were poor, hungry, and barely surviving on odd jobs until Mother joined the dry cleaning business as an apprentice to a Jewish tailor in our area. Even then, we pinched pennies simply to keep food on the table.”[21]

Education

[edit]

Rizzo attended St Anthony’s School,[22] but disliked the nuns there, whom she recalled as being “the meanest people on earth” and treating her with harsh discipline due to her parent’s divorce.[14][22] Mae withdrew Rita from the school, at first temporarily; then permanently.[22]

From the age of fourteen, Rita attended Canton’s McKinley High School, where she was one of the school’s first drum majorettes.[18] She later told an interviewer, “I did very poorly in school. I wasn’t interested in the capital of Ohio. I was interested in whether my mother had committed suicide that day.”[17] Rizzo developed no intimate friendships in high school, partly because of her fear that it would further upset her mother, who saw other demands for attention as a threat.[20] Rizzo never dated, recalling later, “I never had a date, never wanted one. I just didn’t have any desire. I suppose having experienced the worst of married life, it was not at all attractive to me.”[23]

By the time Rita started high school, financial pressure obliged them to return to the Gianfresco home where two uncles and her grandparents were still in residence.[20] Anthony Gianfresco had suffered a stroke and this aggravated his hot temper.[20] However they had regular meals and a roof over their heads.[20] Rita tried to keep up with her school grades with mixed results.[20]

In 1939, Rizzo, feeling overwhelmed by crowd noise and school chatter, began to leave McKinley High in the afternoons.[23] She was given calcium and nerve medication to treat what was deemed a nervous condition.[23] When her mother’s mental condition seemed to worsen, she made arrangements with her grandparents to have her sent to Philadelphia to be with a relative.[24] Left behind with a feeling of guilt, Rita tried to maintain a normal routine, and earned some money baton-twirling. However, she had a deep dread that her fortunes would not improve and her mother not recuperate.[25] Rita gave baton lessons and worked in a factory that made liturgical candles and sent some money to her mother who remained in Philadelphia.[25] However, Rita missed nearly two months school at the end of junior year and failed three subjects. She secretly began summer school without her mother knowing anything.[26] As a result, she had to give up her role as drum majorette, which had given her confidence and ease with crowds.[27] Rita’s mother was improved when she returned from Philadelphia and Rita arranged for her to sit the civil service examination to get a city job. Mae passed and in 1941 became a bookkeeper brought Mae a sense of security and balance.[28] Rizzo graduated from McKinley High School in 1941.[29]

Adulthood

[edit]

In December 1940, Rita had an episode of abdominal pain and diarrhea. She remained unwell and in early 1941 was having spasms about three times a week.[30] The stomach disorder got worse and Rita’s grandparents got her seen by their physician, Dr James Pagano, who expected complications and treated her for possible ulcers or gallbladder problems.[28] The prescribed treatment did not help and by November she lost twenty pounds. X-rays diagnosed stomach ptosis.[28] Treatment with a medical belt improved symptoms and made her life bearable.[28]

Healing and religious vocation

[edit]

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Rita got a job in the advertising department of Tomkins Roller Bearing Company, a major producer of gun barrels, in early 1942.[28] As secretary to the vice president of advertising, Rita was very successful.[31] However in April 1942 her stomach pain got significantly worse, and was no longer controlled by her medical belt. Dr Wiley Scott prescribed a larger belt/corset and the pains subsided, allowing her to go back to work.[31] By November 1942 she could not sleep or eat and her surgical corset caused blisters.[31] Her mother found out about and took her to Rhoda Wise who was hailed as a mystic and stigmatic and “who claimed to receive visions of St Thérèse of Lisieux.”[17] Wise instructed Rizzo to pray a novena (a nine-day course of prayers) and made the girl promise that she would spread devotion to the saint if she was cured.

On January 17, 1943, following the novena’s final day, Rizzo felt the “sharpest pains” she had ever had and “it seemed that something was pulling my stomach out”.[32] She considered attaching the corset before rising but a voice commanded her to get up without it. She knew that she was healed.[32] The abdominal lump and discolouration had vanished.[33] This experience profoundly touched her; she believed that God had performed a miracle and she traced her lifelong commitment to God to this event.[21][34][page needed][35] She later told an interviewer “[at that point] I knew that God knew me and loved me and was interested in me. All I wanted to do after my healing was give myself to Jesus.”[17] Dr Wiley Scott did not support the healing and dismissed Rita as a “neurotic female with a mentality which is very open to any suggestive influence”.[33] For Rita the healing was a milestone that would entirely reorientate her life.[36]

Rita turned to Rhoda Wise for guidance, and she became her model of sanctity.[36] Every Sunday the Rizzo joined the crowds at Wise’s House and Rita would sit close to the mystic. She learned to deal with overanxious crowds who at times mistook God’s assistant from God himself.[36] Rita adopted devotional practices including fasting on Saturdays, reading spiritual literature, and performing the Way of the Cross at St Anthony’s Church, developing a devotion to the Passion.[37] On a Fall afternoon in 1943 when Rita prayed before the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows, she was overcome by a “deep awareness ” that she had a vocation and had to “go wherever the Lord would send her”.[38] She sought out Monsignor Habig, Rhoda Wise’s spiritual director who affirmed the vocation.[38] Rhoda gave her lists of communities to contact, but most would not accept her due to her poor grades.

Her first visit was to the Sisters of St. Joseph in Buffalo, New York.[38] Monsignor Habig then suggested she visit Saint Paul’s Shrine of Perpetual Adoration, a facility operated by an order of cloistered contemplative Franciscan nuns, located in Cleveland, Ohio.[39] When visiting this order, she felt as if she were at home. The order accepted her as a postulant, inviting her to enter on August 15, 1944[40] at the age of 21.[40][41]

On November 8, 1945, Rizzo was vested as a Poor Clare nun. She received a new religious name, Angelica, which own mother Mae Francis was given the honour of choosing, in the gift of Mother Agnes. Mae chose the name because Rita had been an “angelic and obedient daughter”.[42] She became “Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation”.[42] Soon afterwards, the Cleveland monastery established a new monastery in her home town of Canton and she moved there.[21]

After nearly three years in the monastery, Angelica made her first profession of vows on January 2, 1947.[43] In 1953, she made her solemn profession of vows at Sancta Clara Monastery in Ohio.[44]

Injury and “Bargain with God”

[edit]

In 1953, Sister Angelica had an accident with an industrial floor-scrubbing machine that knocked her over and injured her spine, causing her ongoing pain and would later require her to wear leg braces for much of her life. The ache radiated from the small of her back to the middle of the left leg.[45][46][47][48] In June 1955 she sought medical review of her back pain and was given a brace to relieve the pain caused by the fall. The doctors believed the fall in 1953 had aggravated an existing spinal defect. She was fitted for a body cast to relieve her compressed spine and given oversized crutches.[49] This failed and leg and neck traction were attempted and she was suspended from a hospital-bed contraption for six weeks. She spent a total of four months in hospital with no improvement.[50] She went back to the monastery with a back brace.[50] To eliminate pain and restore posture her doctors decided on a spinal fusion operation. She was admitted to hospital for this in July 1956.[50] The surgeon, Dr Charles Houck informed Angelica that there was a “fifty-fifty chance you’ll never walk again.”[50] Angelica struck a bargain with God: “Lord, if you let me walk again, I’ll build you a monastery in the South.” For three years, she had been discussing a southern monastery dedicated to African Americans. This was the year that the Supreme Court banned segregation in public schools and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. made headlines by organising protests throughout the South.[17][51] During the operation, Dr Houck found an extra vertebra crowding its neighbours, and the resulting “kissing vertebrae” were the main cause of her pain. He apparently thought the surgery had gone wrong and gave up; Angelica could move her legs but not walk, so she recovered in hospital for two months. Back at Santa Clara, she was confined to the infirmary. As a result of suffering she learned to rely on God in all things.[52] Eventually she graduated from a wheelchair to a back brace, leg brace and crutch and she felt she could think about the new monastery. The new abbess of Santa Clara, Mother Veronica initially refused but was fully convinced gradually.[53] In January 1957, Mother Veronica wrote to Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Mobile, Alabama stating their desire to be in “the midst of the colored people to intercede for them.” Archbishop Toolen warmly invited the nuns to the diocese and encouraged them to start the community in Birmingham, then home to a quarter of a million black people.[54] Bishop Emmet Walsh of Youngstown delayed the foundation as he felt the departure of six nuns required by Canon Law could not be sustained by the community in Canton. By February 1961, funding had been secured, and Rome granted permission to proceed with the new foundation.[55]

Our Lady of the Angels, Irondale

[edit]

While at Sancta Clara, Angelica was inspired to create a religious community which would appeal to African Americans in the southern states and began to seek support.[44] In 1957, Archbishop Thomas Toolen suggested that she open this community in Birmingham.[44] With a number of other Poor Clare nuns she worked to raise the necessary funds, partially from a small business venture making and selling fishing lures.[44] In 1961, the nuns bought a fifteen acres of mountain-side in Irondale, as well as an adjacent small house, [56] for thirteen thousand dollars, the exact amount earned by the nuns’ fishing lure business.[56] On the night of February 21, 1962, five bullets were fired at the house the nuns were staying, and a further incident with five bullets occurred nearly two weeks later.[57] On May 20 1962, the community was officially established, [58] and named Our Lady of the Angels Monastery.[41] Later, it was relocated to the grounds of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament.[59] The subject experienced the Baptism of the Holy Spirit which a Birmingham priest associated with the charismatic movement had told her about it, which resulted in a new understanding of the Holy Spirit.[60]

Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament

[edit]

Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Hanceville

In August 1995, Angelica began to search for land to build a new monastery. She had a conviction that the sisters needed “protection” during a coming chastisement, and she was concerned the noise pollution around the existing monastery was not suitable for the contemplative life.[61] In October 1995 she viewed a two-hundred acre plot in Hanceville, an hour north of Birmingham. “I felt the Lord’s presence so strongly,” she said.[62] The architect Walter Anderton was a Baptist,[62] and her only instructions were that the monastery resemble the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, and have a 13th-century character.[62] In 1996, Angelica visited South America to publicise her new Spanish-language channel.[63] In Bogotá, Colombia, she visited a small shrine of the Divino Niño. Later, she revealed that she had a vision where the statue of the Child Jesus turned to her, and said with the audible voice of a child, “Build Me a temple and I will help those who help you.”[63] Mother Angelica interpreted this as the Christ Child desiring an elaborate shrine.[64] Private donors contributed $48.6 million,[64] and she opened the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville in 1999. [65]

EWTN

[edit]

In 1962, Angelica began a series of community meetings on matters relevant to Catholicism and also began recording her talks for sale. Bishop Joseph Vath noticed her talent for communicating with the lay public and encouraged her to continue; she began taping a radio show for broadcast on Sunday mornings and published her first book in 1972. In the late 1970s, she began videotaping her talks for television, which were broadcast on the satellite Christian Broadcasting Network.[35] In 1981, after visiting a Chicago television studio and being impressed by its capability, she formed the nonprofit civil corporation to be called the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN).[44][66] Initially, she recorded her shows in a converted garage on the monastery’s property.[59]

On February 16 1981, the Sacred Congregation for Religious informed Vath that Mother Angelica was a cloistered nun and thus may not travel, other than to her studio. She had been giving talks outside for years with the bishop’s blessing. The apostolic nuncio suggested exclaustration (i.e., the suspension of a religious from their community and vows for three years), which shocked Mother Angelica.[67] Cardinal Silvio Oddi, head of the Sacred Congregation for the Clergy rescued the situation; he visited Mother Angelica and secured exemptions under Church law which enabled to leave the monastery on business.[68]

EWTN became a voice for American conservatism and traditionalist Catholicism, with its position on religious and social issues often mirroring that of Pope John Paul II.[69] Mother Angelica’s emphasis on tradition led to feuds with some members of the Church hierarchy, the most famous being over a pastoral letter by Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles concerning teachings about the Eucharist and the liturgy.[70]

The largest Roman Catholic television network in the world,[71] EWTN estimates the network’s channels reach 264 million households globally.[72]

WEWN

[edit]

On December 28, 1992, Mother Angelica launched a radio network, WEWN,[73] which is carried by 215 stations, as well as on shortwave.[74]

Later years

[edit]

On November 12, 1997, Angelica, on her Mother Angelica Live show, called on the faithful under Cardinal Roger Mahony to disobey the cardinal’s Guide for Sunday Mass, saying “I’m afraid my obedience in that diocese would be absolutely zero, and I hope everybody else’s in that diocese is zero.”[75] On November 18, Angelica apologized.[75]

On January 28, 1998, Paula Albertini, an Italian woman prayed the rosary with Mother Angelica in Mother Angelica’s office.[76] Sister Mary Clare saw a bright glow surrounding the painting of Saint Francis reaching up to the crucified Christ. Mother Angelica was urged to “defend the Holy Eucharist even with your own life”.[77] Mother Angelica felt God wished to heal her; Albertini asked she remove the braces and Mother Angelica was cured as her unsteadiness vanished, no longer needing crutches.[78] She later told Life on the Rock host Jeff Cavins the purpose of the healing was to increase the faith of viewers and employees.[79]

In the late 1990s, her EWTN show was so popular that she occasionally was the victim of live, call-in pranks by Captain Janks which were aired on The Howard Stern Show. Most of these calls were of a vulgar, sexual nature, but she handled them with her usual stern, but forgiving candor.[citation needed]

Ad Orientem controversy

[edit]

Since the first establishment of her monastery in 1962, the priest celebrating the conventual Mass had always faced the enclosed nuns, with his back to the rest of the congregation, a stance called ad orientem.[80] Following the Second Vatican Council, most priests began facing the congregation (versus populum), but ad orientem remained favoured in conciliar documents, and this was followed by the monastery.[80] On October 18, 1999, Bishop Foley of Birmingham promulgated a law in his diocese forbidding ad orientem,[81] so Mother Angelica wrote to the Vatican. The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments sent a fax to Bishop Foley condemning his decree, stating that individual diocesan bishops could not forbid ad orientem. However, Mother Angelica was unaware of this and Bishop Foley was able to continue his battle by stating that he was representing the NCCB.[82]On December 4, Cardinal Somalo wrote Mother Angelica that an apostolic visitation had been appointed and there would be a probe into the monastery. On December 9,[79] Bishop Foley consecrated the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament and celebrated Mass facing the people. He then rescinded his decree of October 18, 1999, instead forbidding the broadcast of ad orientem Masses.[83] EWTN moved its Masses to Birmingham to comply with this, as Mother Angelica and the Vice Presidents of EWTN worried that the Congregation or Bishop Foley could compel Mother Angelica to make changes at EWTN or, in a worst-case scenario, appoint a progressive successor with veto powers.[84]Angelica resigned as CEO of EWTN on March 17, 2000, ceding control to a board of laity. She settled into community life and enjoyed her time away from the network. [85]

Stroke and reduced capacity

[edit]

On July 3, 2000, Mother Angelica collapsed, turned blue, and became unconscious.[86] All tests were normal and she recovered rapidly.

On September 5, 2001, Mother Angelica suffered facial paralysis,[87] with an MRI showing she had had bilateral recurrent strokes.[59][87] She returned to taping her show twice weekly on September 25. On December 11, she fell and fractured her arm, requiring surgery.[88]

On Christmas Eve, Angelica collapsed in the monastery chapel and was found unresponsive,[89] a CT scan revealing a cerebral haemorrhage.[90] She was transferred to Birmingham and underwent a craniotomy to remove the blood clot from around her brain.[91] Despite this, there had already been damage to the part of the brain controlling speech and understanding.[91] However, within one week she could move both legs, and the paralysis affecting her left hand and mouth for three months had gone.[79]

On 25 January, 2002, she returned to her monastery,[92] and since then needed assistance. She also suffered from seizures which sapped her energy. [93] She began speech therapy and stopped hosting television programs.[94] As her health declined, fellow sisters at the Hanceville monastery began providing her constant care.[95] Mother Angelica attributed her need for purification as the reason for her stroke. [96]

Last overseas trips

[edit]

Mother Angelica was restless for one more miracle and felt she could be useful in helping the faithful to cope with the clerical sex-abuse scandal which broke in early 2002.[97] In October 2003, she travelled to Lourdes for a six-day pilgrimage. Mother Angelica and the pilgrims there reached out to each other. She did not receive physical healing, but discovered she was still needed and could do much good, even in silence.[98]

In December 2004, Mother Angelica visited the Japanese island of Kyushu. They explored the possibility of a monastery in Nagasaki, and went north to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Akita.[99] She was in considerable pain and a doctor felt Angelica had fractured her tail bone while in Akita.[100] Mother Angelica was much less mobile and frail following this.[101]

Daughter houses

[edit]

Before her major stroke, Mother Angelica had been considering the founding of new monasteries.[102] Following her 2001 stroke, overseeing this seemed beyond reach.[102] There were forty-two nuns at the Hanceville monastery, but not all of the older nuns agreed to founding new monasteries as theirs was only five years old. Five nuns – the “Phoenix Phive” – led by Sister Mary Fidelis, founded a monastery in Phoenix, Arizona in 2005.[103]

In July 2008, Sister Grace Marie, a former Anglican convert, and four other nuns started a new foundation with Mother Angelica’s blessing in San Antonio, Texas. The nuns who left for San Antonio had been “bridging the gap” between two factions of nuns who would soon have a major dispute.[104]

Disharmony at the monastery

[edit]

Mother Angelica remained abbess during this time, but her incapacity left the effective exercise of leadership to the elected vicar, Sister Catherine.[105] Most of the young nuns and many older nuns looked up to Catherine, but a few of the older ones felt marginalised. Sister Catherine began spreading the “Divine Will” devotion rooted in the writings of alleged Italian mystic, Luisa Piccarreta,[106] which some older nuns disapproved of. In May 2009, the community elections saw Sister Margaret Mary chosen as vicar.[107] She quickly called chapter meetings to reconsider the vocations of younger nuns, especially practitioners of the controversial Divine Will devotion. This divided the community as Mother Angelica’s health deteriorated. A group of nuns wrote a letter of complaint to Rome, and the Holy See authorized an apostolic visitation to formally investigate the community. The visitation resulted in the appointment of a new superior from outside the community in November 2009, “ Mother Angelica stepping down as abbess, with both Sister Margaret Mary and Sister Catherine made to leave immediately on sabbatical.[108]

On October 4, 2009, Mother Angelica and Deacon Bill Steltemeier, then-chairman of EWTN’s board of governors, received the Papal Medal (Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice) from Pope Benedict XVI for their distinguished service to the Catholic Church.[109][59] Due to her ill health, Mother Angelica received the award in her room.[110] Robert J. Baker, the Bishop of Birmingham, said: “Mother Angelica’s effort has been at the vanguard of the new evangelization and has had a great impact on our world.”[110] On October 15, Mother Angelica received another major honor from the Holy See when she was appointed the community’s Abbess Emerita for life.[108]

In early December 2015, Mother Angelica was placed on a feeding tube. A representative of the order explained, “It’s not that she’s completely unable to eat. It’s assisting her to get the nutrients she needs.” He added that she had experienced “some up and downs the last few months. She’s a fighter.” Although Mother Angelica was bedridden, a representative said she was “able to communicate with a squeeze of a hand, make gestures with her eyes. She acknowledges people when they’re there. The nuns say she does sleep a lot.”[47][111] The use of a feeding tube was in accord with the wishes she made before her stroke in 2001 – a reporter recalled her saying: “We don’t understand the awesomeness of living even one more day… I told my sisters the other day, ‘When I get really bad give me all the medicine I can take, all the tubes you can stuff down me. … I want to live. … Because I will have suffered one more day for the love of God… I will exercise you in virtue. But most of all I will know God better. You cannot measure the value of one new thought about God in your own life.’”[95]

In early February 2016, Pope Francis, while en route to Cuba for an apostolic visit, recorded a message for Mother Angelica: “To Mother Angelica with my blessing and I ask you to pray for me; I need it. God bless you Mother Angelica.”[47] Near the end of that month, her fellow nuns at Our Lady of Angels Monastery called for prayers on her behalf, saying in a statement: “Mother’s condition remains delicate and she receives devoted care day and night by her sisters and nurses. In God’s Providence, she was able to receive the special Jubilee grace of passing through the Holy Door shortly after its opening. Although she is most often sleeping, from time to time Mother will give a radiant smile. … Please continue to keep her in your prayers; each day is a gift!”[112]

Mother Angelica remained alive at the monastery until her death on March 27, 2016, Easter Sunday, at the age of 92, from complications due to the stroke she had 14 years prior.[113] At the time of her death, she “also suffered from Bell’s palsy, heart disease and asthma.”[46]

Mother Angelica held the Catholic belief in redemptive suffering,[114] wherein human suffering can become meritorious if offered to Jesus Christ and mystically united with his suffering. For this, in her period of declining health, Mother Angelica “instructed her nuns to do everything to keep her alive, no matter how much she suffered, because every day she suffered, she suffered for God.”[46] EWTN chaplain Joseph Mary Wolfe told reporters that Mother Angelica’s desire to unite with Jesus in suffering was fulfilled when she “went into her death throes on Good Friday”.[46]

Wolfe recalled that “Mother began to cry out early in the morning from the pain that she was having. She had a fracture in her bones because of the length of time she had been bedridden. They said you could hear it down the hallways, that she was crying out on Good Friday from what she was going through. These two people [a caregiver and one of the sisters of her order] said to me she has excruciating pain.”[46] Wolfe said that “After the 3 o’clock hour arrived on Good Friday she was more calm, she was more peaceful.”[46] By 5:30 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Wolfe was contacted by Mother Delores, who told him Mother Angelica “was really struggling, she wasn’t doing very well.”[46] Wolfe went to her bedside to administer the last rites, with the sisters of her order then praying the Divine Office around her. As it was Easter Sunday, the usual prayers had additional Alleluias, which are otherwise not recited in the Office for the Dead, something Wolfe felt to be significant. Around 10:30 a.m., Father Paschal said Mass in her room and she received Viaticum (final Communion). She died shortly before 5:00 p.m.[46]

Tributes

[edit]

Sean O. Sheridan, the former president of the Franciscan University of Steubenville where Mother Angelica received an honorary doctorate of sacred theology, described her as “a true media giant. She proved that the Church belonged in the popular media alongside the news, sports, and talk shows”.[72][115] Mark Evans of Deadline wrote, “Though her stances were decidedly old-school – she was critical of religious and political progressives – her lectures were lightened with an often self-deprecating humor. She famously said the nuns she remembered from her youth were ‘the meanest people on God’s earth.’”[72]

On March 30, 2016, Easter Wednesday, at Pope Francis’ general audience in Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican City, an employee of EWTN held up a portrait of Mother Angelica. The Supreme Pontiff responded to the display by saying “She’s in Heaven.”

In a ceremony on March 29, 2016, Mother Angelica’s body was brought to Our Lady of the Angels Monastery for private visitation by Poor Clare nuns. Public visitation was at the upper church of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament from March 30–31. The Mass of Christian Burial was held at the upper church on April 1, with the Archbishop of Philadelphia and EWTN board member Charles J. Chaput serving as principal celebrants and the EWTN chaplain Joseph Mary Wolfe as homilist. Robert J. Baker and David E. Foley, the current and emeritus Bishops of Birmingham (where both EWTN and Our Lady of the Angels Monastery are located), respectively, concelebrated the Mass, along with Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi of Mobile, whose ecclesiastical province includes the Diocese of Birmingham. Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, Bishop Richard F. Stika of Knoxville, and Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, who delivered a message from Pope Francis. In addition, many priests, deacons, religious, and seminarians were in attendance. This was followed by the rite of committal at the shrine’s crypt chapel. All of her funeral rites were broadcast by EWTN.[116][117]

Cause for canonization

[edit]

After Mother Angelica’s death, there were calls from many for her to be canonized. Canon Law dictates that an individual’s cause for sainthood cannot begin until five years after their death.[118] As of September 2022, there has been no announcement from the Diocese of Birmingham whether a petition has been sent to Rome to promulgate a cause for her canonization.

References

[edit]

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