WORD TO YOUR MOTHER:

Mother Angelica’s Empire of the Airwaves: Kathryn Jean Lopez tracks the 20-year growth of Catholic broadcast giant (Crisis, July/Aug 2001)

Hanceville, Alabama, is in the heart of the Bible Belt, in a state with a population that is less than 3 percent Catholic. Turn onto Old Country Road in this northern Alabama town, and you'll likely see more than a few Southern Baptist churches as you drive along. But
soon the religious landscape changes: For a mile or so, just about every house displays a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard. Or a sign indicating that the dwelling is named after a saint and is a guest house for visiting pilgrims. Or a "For Sale" placard naming an astronomical price for the privilege of residing in an area that lives and breathes Catholicism.

Finally, you drive along a seemingly endless white picket fence framing fertile, farmable land, and you see what looks incongruously like a 13th-century abbey, surmounted by an enormous Italian Romanesque church with a red-brick campanile. Its name: the Our Lady of the Angels
Monastery, housing the Poor Clare Nuns of Perpetual Adoration, members of a 147-year-old order of cloistered Franciscan sisters in traditional black-and-white garb. The church has its own name: the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, where the nuns spend their days in the presence of the Eucharist, displayed in an eight-foot monstrance.

You're in the land of Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, P.C.P.A., the 78-year-old nun who brought the Poor Clares to Alabama as their abbess (in 1962), built the Hanceville monastery (it opened in 1999; see "Mother's Magnificent Temple" in the September 2000 issue of Crisis), and helped turn this pocket of Alabama into a veritable Catholic theme park. Mother Angelica is best known as the founder of the Eternal World Television Network (EWTN)--with just under 300 employees, an annual budget of about $29 million, and an audience of about 66 million households in 43 countries, the largest Catholic cable network in the nation.

On August 15, EWTN will celebrate its 20th birthday--two decades of skyrocketing growth since Mother Angelica started it in 1981 with just $200 as a single television station operating out of the garage of her previous monastery in Irondale, Alabama, a Birmingham suburb some 50 miles from Hanceville. Irondale is still the home of EWTN's headquarters, and although Mother Angelica retired as chairman of its board last year, she still makes the drive there twice a week to tape her popular Mother Angelica Live television show in front of a studio audience.

Many Catholics idolize Mother Angelica as a media mogul of faith, an up-to-date version of the video-savvy Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen of the 1950s who did Sheen one better by building her own broadcasting empire. They refer to her reverently as "Mother," and some have moved to Hanceville just to be near her, as the front-yard statues around the monastery indicate.

Perhaps just as many other Catholics can't stand her, finding her needlessly truculent and all too ready to pick quarrels with those who strike her as less than orthodox in their beliefs. Whatever the reactions, Mother Angelica may well be, as Time magazine once described her, "the most influential Roman Catholic woman in America."

The tv remote control offers no more jarring experience than to stumble upon Mother Angelica in the midst of music videos, cartoons, and sports shows. They do a nice program on G.K. Chesterton.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 28, 2003 11:19 AM