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Book Review

FAITH FUELED MOTHER ANGELICA’S STUNNING ACHIEVEMENTS

By Diane Levero

How did she do it?

How did a sickly, nondescript girl with a certifiably wretched childhood grow up to be a cloistered nun who, paradoxically, created the largest religious broadcasting empire in the world?

Raymond Arroyo attempts to answer that question in Mother Angelica:  The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles.

Arroyo, the news director and lead anchor at EWTNews, conducted lengthy interviews with Mother Angelica, her family members, friends and foes to reveal her amazing story – one that, he admits, doesn’t make sense unless you factor in Mother Angelica’s indomitable faith.

Rita Rizzo was born in 1923 in southeast Canton, Ohio, an Italian/black ghetto and red-light district ruled by a group of Sicilian gangsters known as the Black Hand.

Despite Prohibition, her grandfather, Anthony Gianfrancesco, ran a saloon.

Her father, John Rizzo, had never wanted a child, and soon deserted his wife and daughter.  Rita’s mother, Mae, with only a fifth-grade education, struggled to support herself and her child, suffered depression, and frequently threatened suicide.

Mae obtained a divorce when Rita was 7, leading the nuns at St. Anthony’s School to treat the little girl as a social pariah.  When Mae learned of this, she pulled Rita out and put her in public school.

By the time she was in high school, Rita had become a “loner” who never dated or went to dances, worked to help support her unhappy and emotionally dependent mother, and barely scraped through to graduation.

One odd episode in her high school days, however, seemed to hint at resources that lay hidden in the teenager’s psyche.  Encouraged by a teacher, Rita became a spunky majorette, leading the high school band at games and parades.

Upon graduation, thanks to World War II and a booming wartime economy, Rita landed a job as secretary to the vice-president of advertising at a Canton roller bearing plant, where she proved to be an able worker and her boss’s “Girl Friday.”

But Rita had been suffering from a debilitating and excruciatingly painful ailment called ptosis of the stomach that rendered her almost unable to eat, and she was wasting away.

In desperation, Mae took Rita to a renowned local mystic named Rhoda Wise, who told her to make a novena to St. Therese.

Daughter, mother and grandmother Gianfrancesco made the nine-day novena to the Little Flower.  

The morning after the ninth day, Rita experienced the sharpest stomach pains she had ever encountered – and then got up out of bed, completely cured, and asked her grandma to cook her a pork chop.

Her miraculous healing was a pivotal event in her life.  From a self-described “lukewarm Catholic,” she was transformed into a fervent young woman who wanted to give herself completely to Jesus.

At age 21 she joined the Franciscan Nuns of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a contemplative order, slipping away to their monastery in Cleveland without informing her possessive mother.

As a novice, Rita struggled to conform to the rigorous life of a cloistered nun, control her short temper, and cope with the pain of knees that had swollen to the size of grapefruits due to constant kneeling.

In 1945, in the presence of her sobbing but reconciled mother, relatives and friends, Rita was wed to her Beloved Spouse, and became Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation.

That the 22-year-old nun took her betrothal literally was apparent in a touching letter she wrote to her mother that night.

“To have me marry an earthly king would be an honor, but to be espoused to the King of Kings is an honor that even the angels cannot understand,” the young bride wrote.

From then on, Angelica’s love for her Spouse never wavered, and her faith in Him was as firm and strong.

Her rough childhood had given her a thick skin which added to her ability to remain cool in adversity.

She had a snappy, earthy sense of humor, a quick, inventive mind, a natural ability to lead, and shrewd business sense.  She was also a stellar saleswoman.

All these gifts worked together as she pursued a long-time dream to build a monastery in the South where the nuns would pray and sacrifice for the oppressed Negroes.

An episode typifying the by-then Mother Angelica’s style was her marketing campaign to raise funds for the monastery through sales of nun-assembled fishing lures.

Stoked by Mother Angelica’s canny use of free media publicity, St. Peter’s Fishing Lures became a national sensation, and orders for them poured in.

In 1961 Mother Angelica purchased 15 acres of land in Birmingham, Alabama, for $13,000, the precise amount of money earned by the fishing lure business.

And then it was full speed ahead on the building of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, with the feisty nun as on-site construction manager, hobbling about on crutches due to serious and persistent back problems.

The ongoing need for funds to build the monastery led to Mother Angelica’s speaking before various civic and religious groups, and another of the nun’s talents emerged:  an ability to establish a warm rapport with an audience.

By 1975 the indefatigable nun, eager to spread the Faith, was writing and publishing her own religious books, running a Bible study for the laity at the monastery, taping cassettes of her religious talks, and taping a radio show.

On a 1978 trip to Chicago as part of her evangelistic efforts, Mother Angelica visited a Baptist-run television station.

“Lord, I gotta have one of these,” she whispered in a private prayer.

Arroyo traces her astounding journey, from video-taping programs of her talks for the Christian Broadcast Network, to building her own TV studio, to finally building a satellite network – the nation’s first Catholic network – all without money up front, trusting that God would provide.

God “expects me to operate on a faith level,” Mother explained.  “Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach.”

Her subsequent championing  of orthodox Catholic teaching against liberal encroachments, her rivalry with the U.S. bishops’ Catholic Communications Network of America, and her extraordinary run-in with Cardinal Roger Mahony are well-detailed by Arroyo.

A debilitating stroke in 2001 ended Mother Angelica’s active participation in EWTN.

But her legacy lives on:  her religious media empire now brings a clear vision of the beauty, glory and truth of the Catholic Church to over 100 million viewers in hundreds of countries around the world.