Mary Angelica of the Annunciation (born Rita Antoinette Rizzo; April 20, 1923–March 27, 2016), commonly referred to as "Mother Angelica," was an American Catholic nun of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration.

She was known for founding the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), an international Catholic cable television network, on which she hosted the program Mother Angelica Live. She also established WEWN, a radio network used by members of the Catholic Church to disseminate its religious teachings.

In 1981, Mother Angelica began broadcasting religious programming from a converted garage in Birmingham, Alabama. Over the following two decades, she expanded the operation into a global media network that included television, radio, internet platforms, and print publications. She continued to host shows on EWTN until 2001, when she had a stroke. She remained in the cloistered monastery in Hanceville, Alabama, until she died in 2016.

Early life

Mother Angelica was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo on April 20, 1923, in Canton, Ohio. Canton's southeast area, where her family lived, was then known as the city's red-light district. This neighborhood was inhabited by both Black residents and a large number of Italian immigrants employed in the Canton mills. Italian immigrants in the area experienced challenges related to social mobility, including high rates of illiteracy, and extortion by the Black Hand. The neighborhood was also associated with corruption and mob-related violence. Catholic priests at St. Anthony's Church sought to improve the lives of the local population.

Rita was of Italian-American descent and the only child of John Rizzo, a tailor, and Mae Helen Rizzo (née Gianfrancesco). She was born at 1029 Liberty Street, the residence of her maternal grandparents, Mary and Anthony Gianfresco. Anthony had emigrated from Naples, Italy, first settling in Colorado before moving to Ohio and marrying Mary Votolato. Anthony assisted new Italian immigrants with clothing and employment, while Mary provided food to them. Their daughter Mae married John at the age of 22, against the advice of her parents, who disapproved of him. According to later accounts, John had expressed anger on learning that Mae was pregnant. When Rita was baptized at five months of age, her mother brought her to the side altar of Our Lady of Sorrows and handed her over in a symbolic gesture. The family of John and Mae initially lived in a rented house described as infested with cockroaches.

After repeated arguments, Mae began staying at her parents' home, and this became a recurring pattern. Tensions escalated when Mae invited John's mother, Catherine Rizzo, to live with them. Catherine reportedly criticized Mae frequently. By November 1929, John had left the family, relocated to California, and ceased contact with Mae and Rita. Mae and Rita, then age five, returned to the Gianfresco household. On March 10, 1931, Mae was granted full custody of Rita. Although John was ordered to pay five dollars per week in child support, payments were reported to be intermittent. Mae retained custody but struggled with chronic depression and poverty, difficulties that were exacerbated by the societal stigma surrounding divorce and limited economic opportunities for women during the Great Depression.

Between 1933 and 1937, Mae and Rita relocated multiple times to small one-bedroom apartments. These residences typically had a business space at the front and sleeping quarters at the back. Occasionally, when disputes arose between Mae and her mother, Rita stayed with family friends. Due to ongoing financial difficulties, Mae and Rita eventually returned to the Gianfresco household. During their absence, Anthony had suffered a stroke that left him hemiparetic and reliant on a cane.

Reflecting on this period, Mother Angelica later described the circumstances of her mother and her as similar to those of refugees.

Education

Rita attended St. Anthony's School, where she later reported a strong dislike for the nuns, describing them as "the meanest people on earth." She later stated, "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." On November 8, 1945, Rizzo was vested as a Poor Clare nun. She received a new religious name, Angelica, which her mother was given the honor of choosing by the superior of the monastery, Mother Agnes. Her mother chose this name because Rizzo had been an "angelic and obedient daughter." Her full spiritual name was "Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation".

Soon afterward, the Cleveland monastery established a new monastery in her home town of Canton and she moved there. In 1953, she made her solemn profession of vows at Sancta Clara Monastery in Canton.

Injury and "Bargain with God"

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 later requiring 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. 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. This treatment failed, however; so leg and neck traction were attempted, in which she was suspended from a hospital-bed contraption for six weeks. She spent a total of four months in the hospital with no improvement, and she returned to the monastery with a back brace.

To alleviate pain and restore posture, her doctors decided on a spinal fusion operation, for which she was admitted to the hospital in July 1956. The surgeon, Dr. Charles Houck, informed Sister Angelica that there was a "fifty-fifty chance you'll never walk again." 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 the Supreme Court banned segregation in public schools and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made headlines by organizing protests throughout the South.

Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament

thumb|[[Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Hanceville]]

In August 1995, Sister Angelica began to search for land to build a new monastery because she was convinced that the sisters needed "protection" during a coming chastisement, and concerned that the noise pollution around the existing monastery was unsuitable for contemplative life.

In October 1995, she viewed a 200-acre plot in Hanceville, an hour north of Birmingham. "I felt the Lord's presence so strongly," she said. The architect of the monastery, Walter Anderton, was a Baptist. Mother Angelica's only instructions to him were that the monastery resemble the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and have a 13th-century character.

In 1996, Mother Angelica visited South America to publicize her new Spanish-language channel. While in Bogotá, Colombia, she visited a small shrine of the Divino Niño (Divine Child), where she later revealed that she had a vision in which the statue of the Child Jesus turned to her and said in a child's audible voice, "Build Me a temple and I will help those who help you." Mother Angelica interpreted this vision as the Christ Child's desire for an elaborate shrine. Private donors contributed $48.6 million toward it and she opened the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville in 1999.

EWTN

In 1962, Mother Angelica began a series of community meetings on matters relevant to Catholicism and also began recording her talks for sale. When Bishop Joseph Vath of Birmingham noticed her talent for communicating with the lay public, he encouraged her to continue. She began taping a radio show for Sunday-morning broadcast 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. 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.

As the largest Catholic television network in the world, EWTN estimated the network's channels reached 264 million households globally in 2016. In 2026, EWTN reaches an estimated 425 million viewers in over 160 countries. It draws additional viewers on its website, with almost 174,000 average monthly unique viewers in 2024, and another 3.4 million subscribers and followers on social media.

WEWN

On December 28, 1992, Mother Angelica launched a radio network, WEWN, which is carried by 215 stations and on shortwave.

Later years

Among highlights of Mother Angelica's later years are these:

On November 12, 1997, speaking on her Mother Angelica Live show, she called on the faithful under Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony to disobey his 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." Six days later, however, she apologized. as part of her broader efforts to promote Eucharistic reverence and traditional Catholic spirituality on July 25, 1998, the Feast of St. James the Greater, in Hanceville. They initially served there at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, but moved in 2016 to the diocese of Lincoln, at the invitation of Bishop James D. Conley, taking residence at the Our Lady of Good Counsel Retreat House near the small city of Waverly. As her health declined, other sisters at the Hanceville monastery began providing her constant care. Due to her ill health, Mother Angelica received the award in her room. Robert James Baker, 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."

The use of a feeding tube was in accord with the wishes Mother Angelica had 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.'"

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."

Mother Angelica remained 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. At the time of her death, she "also suffered from Bell's palsy, heart disease and asthma." whereby 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."

Greg Evans of Deadline—a publication about major news in the media industry— also known as Deadline Hollywood, 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.'"

Beatification process

After her death, there were calls for Mother Angelica's to be beatified. Canon Law dictates that an individual's cause cannot begin until five years after his or her death, which thus became possible in 2021.

References

Bibliography

  • EWTN: Mother Angelica Official Dedication Site
  • YouTube: Bishop Robert Barron on Mother Angelica
  • YouTube / EWTN: Mother Angelica Live Classics
  • IMDb: Mother Angelica's biography