A shorter version of this article was published August 31 at Homiletic and Pastoral Review.
Even
if you don’t watch Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), you have quite
probably heard about Mother Angela, the feisty Italian-American cloistered nun
from Canton, Ohio, who in 1981−at the age of 58−launched
what quite improbably turned out to be a world-wide TV, radio, and print media
network from a monastery in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama.
Mother
Angelica died on Easter on March 27 of this year at the age of 92, and her death
occasioned an outpouring of remembrances about her life, both from those who
knew her personally and from many of the millions who encountered her through
the network she founded. This unusual woman was hated by many because she
represented what they believed to be an outmoded type of Catholicism and was
loved by many others who came to think of her as a saint.
Pope
Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict both praised her. Even Pope Francis knows
about her. When Pope Francis was flying to Cuba
on February 12 of this year, he offered prayers for Mother Angelica, and he
asked for her prayers in return. Then at a general audience on March 30, a few days after she died, when the pope was asked by
ETWN Rome bureau staffers to say a prayer for her soul, he pointed to the sky and said, “She’s in heaven.”
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| "She's in Heaven!" |
The
widespread attention to Mother Angelica’s death is notable in part because she
has been out of the public eye for almost fifteen years. The only way most
people have been able to see or hear her has been on re-runs on EWTN TV and
radio. She resigned from running the network in 2000. After her resignation,
she continued to appear on her show, "Mother
Angelica Live," for a while, even
after a stroke in September 2001 paralyzed one side of her face.
After
the stroke in September 2001, Mother said, “I’ve never had in all my life such
an awareness that God was choosing me to help people. This is to bring people
to a new reality that suffering is brought by God to make us holy.”
The Pirate Nun Transforms the Heart of a Sinner,
With God’s Love
One
particularly striking story of how—even when she looked ridiculous in some
people’s eyes—Mother Angelica’s words were still capable of capturing people’s
hearts came from a man named Paul, who told the following story
in a video titled, "Desire of the Everlasting Hills," which I came across after Mother Angelica died.
Paul had been an international model, had a lot of money,
and, deplorably, thousands of lovers. He had moved from New York to a home in
California with a boyfriend named Jeff, while remaining promiscuous. One
afternoon he was watching TV “after a hard night running around at the bars, and
I came
across this image, ... this nun with a patch over her eye and distorted face,
and a complete old fashioned habit.” He called out, “Jeff, Jeff, you’ve got to
come and look. It’s a pirate nun!”
“We both mocked
her and laughed at her. But,” Paul continued, “as he left the room and I was
about to change the channel, she said something so intelligent, real and
honest; it really struck me, ‘God created you and I [sic] to be happy in this
life and the next. He cares for you. He watches your every move. There is no
one that loves you can do that.’”
Paul started watching her show
regularly, hiding it from his boyfriend like a dirty secret. Eventually he
returned to the sacraments and embraced a chaste life. He concluded his story
by saying, “Some of my most euphoric moments was when I was with beautiful and
famous people in penthouses overlooking the spectacular skyline of New York
City and I have got to tell you, that happiness, that euphoria that would have
lasted me a lifetime pales next to when I am taking the body and blood of our
Lord in Church at Mass.”
Mother Angelica
had a second stroke on Christmas Eve of 2001 that almost killed her and pretty
much put an end to her on-air appearances. She lost most of her ability to
communicate, and she spent most of the ensuing years in her cloister.
Raymond Arroyo,
who is the EWTN news director and anchor of the weekly show “World Over Live,”
has done a lot to keep her image in front of the public during the last fifteen
years by his books and talks. As Mother Angelica’s biographer and friend,
Arroyo is one of the people who knew her best. Between 2005 and 2010, he
published a series of New York Times best-selling books on Mother Angelica.
First he published her authorized biography Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a
Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles in 2005. That first biography was
based on a long series of deeply personal interviews Arroyo had with Mother at
her monastery between 1999 and 2001, which ended just before the Christmas Eve stroke
that took her out of the public eye.
In 2007, Arroyo published a second book, Mother Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons
and Everyday Spirituality. A third book, Mother Angelica's Private and Pithy Lessons from the
Scriptures, which was derived from a series
of audio tapes from a Bible study series Mother gave, followed in 2008. Then in 2010, in his introduction to The Prayers and Personal Devotions of Mother
Angelica, he wrote that the fourth book completed the cycle of Mother
Angelica works.
Arroyo
recently released a final book about her legacy. We talked about the book in a
phone interview, which is the subject of this article.
Raymond Arroyo Interview
RTSullivan: Thank
you for agreeing to be interviewed for Homiletic and Pastoral Review. I know
this is a busy time for you. You are doing promotions for two books, not only
for Mother Angelica: Her Grand
Silence but also for a young people’s
adventure story you wrote called Will Wilder: The Relic of
Perilous Falls. Thank you for squeezing
this in.
Question:
By the way, how are these books
being received?
Answer:
They’ve been so warmly received. I have to tell you I am overwhelmed by the
letters and the emails, the people who’ve come up at book signings−their
reactions to the two books have just been incredible. Obviously the reactions
are different. But they are both being read by adults as well as young people−which
is humbling and wonderful.
I didn’t
anticipate these two books being in the marketplace at the same time. But
Mother and God orchestrated it that way, so I kind of had to go with it.
In many ways telling
Mother Angelica’s story, the first biography and, of course, this final episode
and chapter of her biography, gave me the confidence to tell big stories, to realize
I had the capability of telling a sweeping saga. That’s really what the Wilder
series is. It’s fiction, but it’s about a family with a special boy who has his
own gifts. It’s an adventure series, but there is a lot of reality and truth in
those pages as well.
Question:
So Will Wilder: The Relic of
Perilous Falls is the first in a series?
Answer:
It is the first in a series. [The second book, Will Wilder: The Lost Staff of Wonders, is being released March 7,
2017.-Ed] It’s a middle grade adventure series and also a family saga. We’re
unlocking the secrets of this Wilder family as we go on.
Genesis of This Latest Mother Angelica Book
RTSullivan: Let’s come back to this
latest book in your Mother Angelica series. In 2010, in your introduction to The Prayers and Personal
Devotions of Mother Angelica, you wrote that
the fourth book completed the cycle of Mother Angelica works.
Question:
What made you decide to
extend the cycle and write Mother Angelica: Her Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living
Legacy?
Answer:
I
never intended to do another Mother Angelica book. I saw the Prayers and Personal Devotions as a
capstone of the series. However, I had promised Mother and I promised my
publisher that I would tell the full story of her life. So it was always
envisioned that I would update the biography.
I
anticipated like so many, even those nearest Mother, that it was going to be a
matter of a year, or two, or three years, given the stroke, given her health,
we just didn’t know how long she would survive. But as God would have it, and her
great tenacity, and the care of the sisters, all conspired to keep her with us for
many many years beyond the stroke, a good fifteen years.
The
rich story that presented itself−that I knew I had to tell−there was no way it
would fit as an addenda. My publisher said there’s too much information. You’re
going to have to release this as a separate book. That’s how the sequel was
born.
It’s
fitting that it be the conclusion of her biography. It’s also a tribute to her.
It’s my farewell to her−and I think a meditation, curiously, on the
power of the end of a life and the power of suffering and pain, which is what
Mother’s whole life testifies to, I think.
Living in the Present
Moment
RTSullivan: She seemed to know a lot
more about the value of suffering than a lot of people ever hear about. I want
to ask you some more questions about that later.
You might remember I
interviewed you after the first biography came out, and that you spoke about
how much Mother Angelica taught you about the need to live in the present
moment after you lost your New Orleans’ home in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina and after your publicity tour for the first biography seemed to be
irretrievably derailed because of breaking news.
Question:
Where do you think Mother
Angelica got that idea about living in the present moment? Do you still find it
relevant today?
Answer:
Oh,
very much so. In fact, in this new book, Mother
Angelica Her Grand Silence, I went to great pains to write a chapter about our
relationship. And I say pains because it did not come easily, it was something
I resisted at first. In it, I captured just that idea that one of the great
lessons she gave me was how to live in the present moment.
Mother
had a life that was so riddled with pains and unexpected suffering that she had
to learn to quickly adapt to those challenges and to embrace them as God would
have her embrace them. On the far side of those she found such consolation, she
found power, she found Jesus.
Watching
her traverse tragedy and things none of us would wish upon ourselves or those
we love, watching the way she handled them and embraced both the good times and
the bad was such a lesson for me.
Absolutely,
it’s relevant every moment of my life.
If
it wasn’t for Mother, I don’t know how we would have survived not only Katrina,
but my wife was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. That was traumatic. There
are awful things that just come into our lives−amid
the many blessings and wonderful things. You have to embrace both of them and
live in them fully.
That’s
what I think she was trying to impart. You can’t fantasize about the future, and
you can’t anguish and relive the past. Guess what? We all get kicked around. There
are horrible people in the world. You have to kind of move past them and move onto
the next thing that God wants you to do.
People
always ask me, “How can you go from covering live events, to working on a
musical project, to writing a children’s book, to being a father . . .?” Well, that’s
all living in the present moment. These inspirations come to me in the present
moment, and I embrace and run after them in the present moment.
The
way she explained it to me was, it doesn’t mean we can’t make plans, it doesn’t
mean that we sort of run like a leaf blown in the wind. No. No. No. You have to
make plans, you have to keep a schedule.
But,
when things come at you, whether it’s an inspiration, it’s something wonderful,
or it’s a tragedy, something you didn’t expect, a betrayal from a person you
didn’t expect to turn on you, you embrace those moments as they happen, and, as
she said, you try to be like Jesus in them. You fulfill the duties and
responsibilities of that present moment. It keeps you rooted in the now so
you’re fully present here.
You
are not stuck in the past. Your mind isn’t worried and fretting and crying about
the future. We have to stay here. This is the moment we are given. There are
great lessons and gifts if you are willing and ready to embrace them. That’s
what she was saying.
The Saving Value of
Suffering
RTSullivan: I think that a lot of
Catholics are not aware of a significant verse in Saint Paul’s letter to the
Colossians, which the Church interprets to mean that all of our sufferings can
have immense value if we offer them up in union with Christ’s sufferings, for
the salvation of the world.
“[I,
Paul,] now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are
wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the
church.”−Colossians 1:24
I have never heard a
sermon on the saving power of suffering. I think, in a sense, Mother Angelica’s
life could be viewed as a kind of sermon on the topic.
Question:
Do you agree? If so,
what message about the salvific power of suffering do you think might belong in
a sermon based on her life?
Answer:
I
couldn’t agree with you more. Mother was an apostle of Divine Providence, and she
was an apostle of Redemptive Suffering. Those are her two great gifts, I think,
to the Church and to the world. She taught about these two important issues throughout
her entire life from when she was a young sister to when she could no longer
speak.
What
you get to see in this last book (and you get a front row seat on it I hope), is
Mother Angelica’s full embrace in the present moment of God’s Providence. It
was filled with pain and suffering, but she finds and brings much good out of
it, because she is united with God. She is offering it up to Him.
That’s
the lesson for us. This is a journey all of us will go on. We are not all going
to build networks. We are not all going to see visions. But all of us in some
way are going to have pain and suffering in our life. We are all going to face
the final journey in this existence, and hopefully prepare ourselves for the
next.
That’s
what is at the heart of this book.
At
a time when people wish to shove the frail elderly aside, to create laws that
make it easier for us to send them to the next part of their journey before this
one is completed, Mother Angelica stands as a counter-cultural witness and
says, “No.” There is great value in this end of life. In fact, it may be the
most richest and most important part of our life. No one should deprive that of
another.
Where Did She Learn the
Value of Suffering?
RTSullivan: Where do you think she
learned this? Mother Angelica’s insights about suffering seem to parallel Pope
Saint John Paul II’s teachings on the subject. I read her ideas clearly stated
in one of her many little devotional books, “Healing Power of Suffering,” which
you have also quoted. In 1984, Pope John Paul II published Salvici Doloris,
which can be literally translated as “on saving suffering.”
Question:
Do you think Mother
Angelica read Salvici Doloris?
Answer:
Yes.
Without a doubt, I’m sure she did. But you know that minibook you referenced was
written in the seventies, so that was before John Paul came along.
Their
lives were in parallel in many ways, you know. It was in October of 1978 when
she was first was inspired to build the television network, and, of course,
that was when he was elected Pope. And they both were these charismatic and
amazing evangelists in our time.
They
both in their later years faced great infirmity and lost the ability to speak
that so characterized them. They both learned to teach in silence in some ways.
I do see a parallel track for these two saintly figures.
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| Mother Angelica After the Stoke That Silenced Hefr |
Mother Angelica’s
Sufferings and EWTN’s Success
RTSullivan: In your first biography,
you gave many examples of how Mother Angelica understood the great value of
suffering in the development of the network. You mentioned that when she was
rendered almost speechless after the Christmas Eve stroke of 2001, that she
told you that she knew it was for her purification. You wrote in her biography
that she read St. John of the Cross.
Question:
Do you know if she knew
of other great saints who taught about this topic? I wonder if she read about
this doctrine in the writings of other saints.
Answer:
She
did, as a young nun. She read a lot of the lives of the saints, because she was
so sickly for much of her early vocation. She was often in bed, or she couldn’t
get up, with the back surgery and all. And at that time, I think she probably
exhausted the monastery library of all the lives of the saints. She knew things
about saints that I’d never heard. Not only did she understand, I think on an
intuitive level, their thought, but she knew the personal side. This one was
grumpy, that one was fat, this one was cross, this one had hangnails. She knew
every little detail about them. She humanized them. And that was a great lesson
to me when I wrote the first biography and when I wrote this sequel.
She
threatened me with forty years in purgatory if I sugar-coated her life. The
reason she did that is that she wanted people to identify with her failings and
with her humanity. And so, I felt an obligation to just tell the story as it
existed.
When
I wrote her life story, as Mother would say, I wanted it to be nitty gritty. I
wanted it to have the blood and guts in the story. These are not always happy tales.
Every part of the journey is not marked by sweetness and light. But that was
Mother’s story; that’s all of our stories, I think.
The Skirmishes of Mother
Angelica
RTSullivan: I’d like to know your
thoughts about Mother Angelica’s skirmishes with the liberalizing tendency in
the Church in the 1980s and 1990s and whether those kinds of conflicts lessened
in the 2000s and 2010s.
You wrote in the first
biography about run-ins that she had with some American bishops, who were trying
to launch a Catholic network of their own. Many of them expressed their
distaste for what one priest called “her kind of theology.” It seems now that
she won over the opposition, and that “her kind of theology” is now accepted.
In an amazing sequel, Pope
Francis even asked for her prayers, and he even informally canonized her!
Question:
Did you add any more details about those
kinds of battles she went through and their outcomes after the initial biography?
Answer:
The
[first] biography is pretty conclusive in those battles. She really did win all
of them in my mind. The things she fought for, the rosary, Eucharistic
adoration, the sacrality of the Mass, Latin in the Mass, what is now called the
Extraordinary Form, those things were considered relics of another age, never
to be seen again. Mother Angelica not only kept them alive, she popularized
them. She put all those devotions in front of the eyes of the masses so they
could see what they had been missing.
Remember
that she had a titantic battle with her local bishop, Bishop David Foley, near
the end of her active life. He didn’t want the Mass televised ad orientem,
facing away from the people. The whole Bishops Conference basically said it’s
up to him.
Well,
I had to chuckle a little at her funeral because I saw Bishop Foley there on
the altar. And I thought to myself, only Mother Angelica could pull this off. Not
only did she get a Mass celebrated ad orientem, but it was broadcast on
television, and an archbishop was celebrating it. Only Mother could have pulled
that off.
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| Tweet I sent of Mother Angelica's Ad Orientem Funeral Mass |
What Did the Battles
Cost Her?
RTSullivan: I’d like to find out
more about the personal cost of Mother’s battles to defend the truth as she
understood it. Mother was intransigent in her dealings with those who wanted to
silence her or to change traditional Catholic doctrine. But at least one of
your stories hints that at some level she must have found the conflict
terrifying. You wrote about what is commonly called a “near-death experience”
in 2001 in which Mother said she left her body three times and that when she
came back she said she wasn’t afraid of death any more. I think it’s
significant that she also mentioned she was no longer afraid of the bishops
either! Psychologically she probably paid a big price.
Question:
Do you have any more new
insights about her battle with some members of the Church hierarchy that you
included in your new book? And about how those battles affected her?
Answer:
Psychologically
and physically, it was a great trial. It’s one thing when people from outside
the Church come after somebody, but Mother was really fighting a two-pronged
war, because she was fighting those outside the Church, and then she was
fighting those inside the Church.
The
stroke probably would not have happened if she hadn’t been under such stress
and duress.
She
was carrying a heavy load. She wasn’t a well woman. She wasn’t a physically
vibrant woman. She had lot of health problems, bloated heart, crushing asthma. She
had diabetes. She was crippled. There were a lot of things Mother suffered from
that people just don’t realize when they saw the happy, smiling, funny nun on
TV.
All
of those battles I do think took a toll on her, without a doubt.
Mother Angelica’s Example of Female Empowerment
RTSullivan: Let’s talk about the role of women in the Church
as exemplified by Mother Angelica’s life. I’d like to know your thoughts about
this excerpt from an article at Crux.com that was written by John L. Allen after Mother Angelica’s
death: “Today there’s a great deal of ferment about how to promote
leadership by women in the Church in ways that don’t involve ordination, a
conversation Pope Francis himself has promoted. In a way, however, debating
that question in the abstract seems silly, because we already have a classic,
for-all-time example of female empowerment in Mother Angelica.”
Question:
What do you think of that?
Answer:
He’s right. That’s a fair assessment. Both Mother Angelica and Mother Teresa were
two of the most powerful people in the Catholic Church; they both happened to
be women, and neither of them was ordained.
Look, Mother had no use for
political empowerment. She was not interested.
She was all about following God’s will. And for her, God’s
will took her down this path. I think she became a great exemplar of faithfully
living out God’s will. It wasn’t about power. It was about doing what you were
called to do.
She had a great line she used to say, “People spend all
their time trying to figure out what they are going to do for the world. The real
question is, ‘What is God going to do−through you−for the world?’”
This was how she saw her role, what she was doing. It wasn’t
about her. That is not only about female empowerment, it is about human empowerment.
What Do People
Need to Know About Mother’s Last Years?
Question:
What details that you
may not have already mentioned about Mother Angelica’s contribution to the
world and about her last years in silence do you think would be most relevant
for readers to know?
Answer:
I
come across so many priests so many nuns who say they owe their vocation to
Mother Angelica. She was a powerful witness. Many who have read this book said,
“It has so enriched my work.”
This
book teaches you how, even in distress and in the dark moments, God is still
with you, and that you have to continue that zealous embrace of His will to the
very end. That is part of ministry.
I
think there are so many gifts in this last part of her story for people. The
letters I’ve gotten have attested to the ways it has touched so many lives. I
love that I was able to share not only how she touched lives all over the world
(you read the first hand accounts of that in the book) but also about how she touched
my life, how she changed my life.
You
can see her transforming the lives of her nuns, millions of people around the
world, as well as those of us who were closest to her. That’s the story of
every religious, that’s the story of every priest, or it should be.
Mother
Angelica got a twenty-year hall pass where she could make contact with the
public at large, because God had this great mission for her. But in the last fifteen
years, she became fully what she vowed to be at the first, which was cloistered
nun. With silent prayer, hidden away and yet powerful, powerful results occur. That’s
all due to that prayer and suffering.
That’s
what this last story is about, the mystery of contemplative prayer, and the
mystery of redemptive suffering. And how it all plays out through the story of
this amazing, very humble, simple woman, who just followed where God led her.
What
an honor to be able to tell that story.
Mother Angelica Her
Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living Legacy. Raymond Arroyo. (New
York: Image, 2016.)
