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Mother Angelica Her Grand Silence

  • RAYMOND ARROYO

The spacious cell at the monastery where she spent her last years was almost always muggy — like any grandmother's room.


arroyo51The whir of the oxygen machine in the corner ricocheted off the tiled floor, providing the only constant sound in the space.  Bookshelves and a dresser near her bed were laden with statues of saints, an oversized Child Jesus, religious cards, and relics.  And there, bundled in a hospital bed, beneath a faded painting of the wounded Savior, a white ski cap atop her head, lay the most powerful and influential woman in Catholicism: the indomitable Mother Angelica.

As late as 2010, although she was bedridden and weakened by a stroke, the old nun's spunk remained intact.  I walked into Mother's cell one afternoon to find her tugging the bedsheets up over her mouth, engaged in a daily war.

"Mother, you have to eat if you want to stay strong and healthy," the tiny Vietnamese nun, Sister Gabriel, fussed, extending a spoonful of mashed potatoes toward Mother's face.  Angelica, having none of it, turned her glance toward the doorway.

"Is she trying to force-feed you again?" I jokingly asked as I entered.

Mother smiled broadly, tilting her face toward Sister Gabriel's spoon, and lowered the bed linen.  Then just as the food approached, she yanked the sheet up again blocking the potatoes' entry.

"Oh, Mother," Sister Gabriel said in frustration.  Delighting in the mayhem, Angelica let loose a wheezy cackle for my benefit.  She winked at me and then having had her fun, quickly opened her mouth to accept the first morsel of lunch.

"She always gives me a hard time with lunch.  Don't you, Mother?"  Sister Gabriel said, offering a second scoop of potatoes.  Mother pursed her lips and slowly shook her head from side to side.  Lunch was over.

The moment struck me as classic Mother Angelica: the steely will, the slightly subversive humor, the joy that millions all over the globe had come to love were on full display for anyone entering that overheated room.  I was partly to blame for the show.  Sister Catherine, the onetime vicar of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, claimed that Mother would "perform" when I showed up.  It was as if she remembered the fun we had in days gone by and wanted to let me know that she was still game — her disability be damned.

The moment struck me as classic Mother Angelica: the steely will, the slightly subversive humor, the joy that millions all over the globe had come to love were on full display for anyone entering that overheated room.

My regular visits with Mother Mary Angelica never really ended.  The frequency of our personal meetings was impeded by her stroke and her eventual confinement to the cell, but they continued — vastly altered — right up until her passing.

Mother Angelica hired me as news director at EWTN in 1996 and over time became much more than an employer to me.  I cohosted her Mother Angelica Live program for a few years, and we often had long personal conversations at the end of the workday or after the live shows on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.  While I was working on her biography, from 1999 to 2001, we'd meet every Saturday in her monastery parlor, peering at each other through the wrought-iron latticework separating the world from the cloister.  During those intense interviews she could be explosive, hilarious, conspiratorial, and holy — at times all at once.  With Italianate gusto she shared how a tenacious faith reshaped the life of a wounded girl from Canton, Ohio, and changed the world.

In the lusterless suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, this crippled nun, who barely graduated high school, founded a cable network in her cloister garage in 1981.  She would tend the fledging operation for two decades, crossing swords with errant bishops, beating back takeover attempts, and struggling with her own infirmity to make the Eternal Word Television Network the largest religious media organization on the planet.  It was her personality — her particular ability to connect with viewers and spiritually console them in moments of distress — that propelled the thing forward.  They could feel her faith and were warmed by it.  Away from the cameras, it was Mother Angelica's mystical intimacy with pain and suffering that fueled EWTN's growth and made her one of the world's most beloved spiritual figures.

This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.

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Acknowledgement

arroyoRaymond Arroyo. "Introduction." excerpt from Mother Angelica Her Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living Legacy (New York: Image, 2016): 1-4.

Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Author

arroyo1angelica51 Raymond Arroyo is the news director and lead anchor of EWTN news. As creator and host of the news magazine The World Over Live, he is seen in more than 100 million households each week. He has worked at the Associated Press and the New York Observer, and for the political columnist team of Evans and Novak. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Raymond Arroyo is the author of Mother Angelica Her Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living Legacy, Mother Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality, The Prayers and Personal Devotions of Mother Angelica, Mother Angelica's Private and Pithy Lessons from the Scriptures, Will Wilder: The Relic of Perilous Falls, and the New York Times bestseller Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles. He lives in northern Virginia with his wife and three children. Raymond Arroyo's web site is here.

Copyright © 2016 Image Catholic Books