Mother
Angelica
The Poor Clare nun who built the world's largest religious media network from a converted garage in Alabama with $200 - and changed Catholic broadcasting forever.
Mother Angelica · Foundress of EWTN
A girl from Canton who became a broadcaster
Rita Antoinette Rizzo was born in 1923 in Canton, Ohio, the only child of Italian-American parents. Her father abandoned the family when she was young, and her parents divorced in 1929 when she was six. She and her mother lived in poverty during the Great Depression. As a teenager, Rita suffered from a painful stomach condition that doctors couldn't fix.
A novena to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, prayed at the suggestion of Canton mystic Rhoda Wise, healed her overnight. The encounter changed her. "That was the day I realized God's love for me and began to thirst for Him," she later said. On August 15, 1944, at the age of twenty-one, she entered the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in Cleveland and took the name Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation.
By all conventional logic, this should have been the end of her public story. Cloistered nuns are not famous. They do not build media empires. But Mother Angelica was never going to follow conventional logic. After a serious back injury, she made a promise: if she could walk again, she would build a monastery in the American South. She walked. In 1962, she moved with four other sisters to Irondale, Alabama, and founded Our Lady of the Angels Monastery.
Unless you are willing to do the ridiculous, God will not do the miraculous.
April 20, 1923
March 27, 2016
(1981)
(Benedict XVI, 2009)
The garage that became EWTN
In 1978, Mother Angelica recorded her first television program for a local Birmingham station. She was self-taught - no broadcasting background, no media training, just a script and a camera. When she walked into a Chicago studio in 1981 and saw a Christian broadcaster with their own network, she went home and told her sisters they were going to do the same thing.
They built a studio in the garage of their monastery. She had $200 to her name. She convinced a satellite uplink company to give her access. On August 15, 1981, the Eternal Word Television Network went live with four hours of programming a day, transmitted from a converted garage in rural Alabama to whatever Catholic households had a dish big enough to catch the signal.
Today, EWTN reaches over 250 million households in more than 145 countries. It is the largest religious media network in the world. It owns radio stations, publishing houses, a wire service, and websites. Every minute of every day, somewhere on the planet, someone is listening to programming that traces back to a nun in Alabama who had $200 and decided that wasn't a reason to stop.
Why she matters now
Mother Angelica was famous for her bluntness. She spoke in plain English about complicated theology. She picked fights with bishops. She was televised live, five nights a week, taking questions from callers without a script. She made mistakes on air and kept going. She was not polished. She was not credentialed. She was not what anyone thought a "media personality" was supposed to look like.
And she built the largest religious media network in the world.
She is the model for anyone who has been told they don't have the budget, the experience, or the platform to do the thing they're being called to do. She is proof that the gap between "this is impossible" and "this is happening" is sometimes just one person who refuses to wait for permission.
She suffered a major stroke in 2001 that left her unable to speak publicly for the last fifteen years of her life. She died on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016. Three days later, Pope Francis told EWTN staff in Rome, pointing to the sky, "She is in heaven." In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI had conferred on her the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Cross - the highest papal honor for laypeople and clergy.
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