The Voice of Mother Angelica

by Raymond T. Gawronski

<He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank thee, Father, Lord 
of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise 
and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such 
was thy gracious will>" (Luke 10:21).

The name of Mother Angelica is in the air nowadays. Some months ago, 
during a Christmas visit north of Schenectady, a man I met at a 
dinner sang her praises. An Italian ethnic, first-generation college 
educated family man now in his early 40s, he lit up at mention of her 
name, and said sure, he watches her. He can relate to her and finds 
what she has to say good. He added that he has never quite trusted 
the Protestant evangelists, not even Billy Graham. It must be their 
style. Too different.

In New Jersey I watched the Polish evening news from Warsaw last 
Christmas day on cable television: sure enough, a report on Mother 
Angelica. An "item," Mother Angelica had just appeared in the "New 
Faces" section of People magazine (as far as I can tell, she is the 
only face not selling itself somehow--her eyes in the photo are cast 
resolutely heavenward). The Polish reporter stated: Even though most 
American Catholics are dissidents from Rome, Mother Angelica follows 
the orthodox line on abortion, the ordination of women, etc. 
Interestingly, the Polish report showed her and her staff praying 
before she goes on stage. The report focused on her talk show, 
"Mother Angelica Live," but failed to indicate the nature of the rest 
of the round-the-clock programming her network offers.

I had heard of her while living in Europe, but never watched her on 
visits to the States because my family never got cable television, 
and because, when staying in Jesuit houses with it, I could never 
figure out how to operate all those remote controls.

She was already a figure of mildly mythic proportions when "the great 
blow-up" occurred. I was there when it happened, right there in Mile 
High Stadium during the Pope's visit to Denver. I guess I had become 
uncomfortable when some Politically Correct material began to appear 
on the screens, beamed at the thousands of young people there, a 
certain sort of report from Latin America. Then there were some 
American feminist lines from a young woman. Oh well, I reasoned, it 
takes all kinds: diversity, patience. But when the Way of the Cross 
began, I thought I saw a female figure representing Christ. I asked 
my companions if they saw the same. Yes, little by little they 
agreed, this is not a man representing Christ Jesus: It is a woman, 
about to carry the Cross.

My mind dragged back to a Protestant school of theology in Berkeley 
which had held ceremonies around the image of a crucified woman, 
"Christa," amid a strange assortment of bitter women in Birkenstocks 
and weak men tailing along. I knew something was fishy about this 
"female Christ" then, something wrong. Now, in Denver, I looked at 
the program, at the list of names of people involved in planning this 
particular evening, and I encountered names I had run across, names 
involved in ecclesiastical power politics in the Washington, D.C., 
establishment.

I left the stadium feeling a little sick a little sad, for I knew 
that certain ecclesiastical politicians had scored another victory. I 
left the stadium quietly. I was not florid, nor agitated. I had been 
this route so many times before. Manipulation and politics in the 
Church seem inevitable. But they remain disedifying. Recalling that 
poet Robinson Jeffers wrote that when corruption takes the cities 
there are always the mountains, I walked out of the stadium and said 
a rosary under the stars in the parking lot, wondering what the Lord 
of the Universe made of this display. I bought a Dr. Pepper and 
talked to some bus drivers.

When I returned to my community in Milwaukee, I heard that Mother 
Angelica had taken the field with prophetic fury: that she had "gone 
ballistic" on television. She had had enough: She had watched them--
the theological liberals--for years, and now she (correctly, I was 
sure) saw their nefarious hand behind this latest outrage. I did not 
yet know how to jockey the remote controls to educe her image on the 
screen, but I knew then that I loved this woman of God. Perhaps she 
was occasionally red in the face, not cool; perhaps she let her 
outrage be known to all and sundry. Displays of emotion are totally 
uncool in our bourgeois world: Someone who is labeled "angry" is 
destined for therapy or perdition or both. But I praised God, for I 
knew that Heaven had heard an unspoken prayer for justice--that rare 
thing Our Lord has promised to those who must, for awhile, hunger and 
thirst for it.

We have been blessed with others on this continent, in our century: 
strong women of God who have made the establishment uncomfortable. 
Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty. It is our shame as males to 
have produced so few. I suspect most of us are destroyed early on by 
the team spirit that crushes independence and plays to our male 
"bonding" instincts. No matter I am coming to believe God has raised 
up a prophet for us in our time and place, and her name is Angelica.

Funny: There are official prophets galore. There is no dearth of 
studies and seminars on women in the Church rebuking Pontiffs in the 
Middle Ages, full of intimation that it is the task of the prophet 
always to rebuke--the Pontiff! But the saints spoke in the name of 
Christ, on mission from Him: The problem is that the voices which 
have of late been heralded as "prophetic" seem generally to take 
their inspiration from the editorial pages of The New York Times. 
Actually, it is our poor Pope who is the voice crying in the 
wilderness, an ascetic begging others to return to Christ.

What makes Mother Angelica so appealing to many? In no small part it 
is because she is the voice of the little guy, people who have been 
held in contempt in their Church for at least 30 years. She is not 
part of the ruling elite, nor has she chosen to be identified with 
it. She often makes reference in her shows to her Italian parentage. 
She was born and raised in today's "Rust Belt." That background makes 
her part of the large group of late Catholic immigrants who were 
alienated in the older "American" Church and never quite found their 
place in it, and thus are perhaps freer than others to have the 
critical distance needed for true discernment.

Put differently, her audience, like her style, seems to be largely 
blue-collar. They are the "second world" of the American Catholic 
Church: those who have been lost between the children of the old 
Catholic immigrations who are largely culturally assimilated and the 
official "minorities" with which the Catholic establishment, taking 
its lead from the secular cultural elite, has been preoccupied.

These cultural and economic differences are seen very clearly in 
opposing attitudes toward Catholic piety. At a public lecture not too 
long ago, I heard an American prelate pour contempt on Catholics who 
are concerned about keeping kneelers in their churches; he then held 
the "polka Mass" up to scorn as a symbol of that sort of popularism 
that afflicts the Church liturgically. In the same talk the prelate 
let slip a boast of his northwestern European ancestry. There are 
plenty of Catholics who are concerned about what has been happening 
to their Church (who also have little time for polka Masses), but who 
feel as powerless and alienated in the Church as they do in their 
country: In both cases national elites make decisions from which they 
are by and large excluded. This is an experience of Catholics of all 
cultural backgrounds, to be sure, even as the elite counts members of 
all backgrounds. But still, the devotional traditions of southern and 
eastern Europeans have largely been lost in the postconciliar 
"American Church."

That the devotions of common people should have been lost is no 
coincidence. Friedrich Heer has written that "the real problem" is 
that in "all questions of dogma the pressure of the superstitious 
masses played an important role. [Karl] Rahner pleads with modern 
theologians to work against this 'popular' form of piety...." Here we 
are near the heart of why Mother Angelica is despised by members of 
the elite and loved by the alienated: She represents the 
"superstitious masses"--peasants, as in the Polish "peasant Pope"--
who have so embarrassed the assimilationist intellectual leadership 
of the American Church for so long. Of course, it is not 
superstition, but simple piety, that is the issue.

A young layman recently interrupted dinner to invite a brother Jesuit 
and myself to watch "Mother Angelica Live." When I asked him what 
about her so appeals to him, he said one thing: devotion. Others have 
pointed out that since the Council, popular piety has all but 
disappeared from our Church. If Friedrich Heer is right, the dominant 
forces behind the "renewal" of the Church have been dead set against 
popular piety having any input in the significant decisions of the 
Church. Mother Angelica is frankly pious, though in a no-nonsense way 
which is refreshingly American.

Of course, no one is claiming Mother Angelica is flawless. She is 
certainly strong-minded, but then in our feminist age this should be 
no sin. What makes her winning to many of us is that no matter what 
she says, no matter how her show goes, sooner or later her unabashed 
love for the Lord Jesus comes through. Yes, this is piety, and it is 
impossible for me to imagine a living faith without it. This much 
must be noted: She manages at some point in every show to lead her 
questioner to the love of God for him.

She herself appears only a few hours a week. Her television 
programming is round the clock, broadcast now to dozens of countries, 
in English and Spanish. In general, the shows attempt to weave piety 
into a theological re-education in which the traditional Catholic 
faith can find expression. The shows on her Eternal Word Television 
Network (EWTN) are generally surprisingly sophisticated in 
presentation. So the rosary--which could have just featured some 
pious souls droning on--is prayed with rich visual color, oftentimes 
with an educational approach.

For the first time since Bishop Sheen, then, there is a strong and 
clear Catholic presence regularly available on the screen. Thanks to 
Mother Angelica-- and to her alone--millions of people were able to 
watch the Holy Father "live" during his recent visit to the East 
Coast. Not the brief reports by a medium which even when friendly 
insist on treating the Catholic Church as somehow more alien to 
American life than Tibetan Buddhism. Watching EWTN, one saw the Vicar 
of Christ fly into Newark Airport--not JFK--and speak to the 
thousands who braved a fierce rain in Giants' Stadium in the Jersey 
Meadows to pray with him. Watching their faces, I saw the people one 
sees in Mother Angelica's studio audience: the patient, hard-working, 
sacrificing family people who make up that ethnic symphony that drew 
Dorothy Day into the Church.

I submit that in Mother Angelica we have, for the second time in 
recent memory, seen God's justice dramatically effected in this 
world. Mother Angelica is like our Pope She came out of nowhere. He 
came from Poland, that backward province of Christendom which, having 
most recently been betrayed by Hitler and Stalin, was made the 
laughingstock of the American media while its faithful stumbled along 
a decades long Way of the Cross. Reread the prognostications of the 
pundits before the last papal election to understand the blindness of 
our media guides. Mother Angelica lives in Alabama, in the despised 
South, but her accent, her style is that of the ethnic Northeast of a 
former generation, those people who manned factories and mines and 
who left behind beautiful churches and then culturally disappeared, 
while their progeny now fill lesser positions in the Rust Belt or 
have themselves been dispersed in housing tracts in the Southwest. It 
is perfect that she broadcasts from Irondale, Alabama, and not 
Manhattan.

She speaks for and to those who have had their public worship 
"hijacked" from them (and whose pathetic phone calls to her indicate 
that their sense of helplessness in the face of governing elites 
remains unabated). She speaks for and to those who wonder what has 
happened to their children: those heartbroken parents who come to 
priests in tears and say, "Father, we sacrificed to send our children 
to Catholic schools all the way through and they don't know the 
Faith, and they have left it." And leave it they have, often to 
become pious evangelical Protestants.

She is so threatening that one churchman has been heard to ask 
something like: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome nun?" Perhaps she 
will yet be gotten off television somehow, though I doubt it: The 
very rocks themselves will cry out (and besides she is now on short 
wave radio).

She has rough edges. I'm not at all sure we would get along, but 
that's unimportant. In a way, she has the vitality, brashness, and 
independence of outlook of a simpler America, before it yielded to 
the iron hand of the PC establishment. She evidences little 
theological sophistication. That is not her mission. She is a strong, 
steady voice in a dark media maelstrom, and as such should be 
welcomed by all who would see the world evangelized.

Of late a story has made the rounds that a very powerful member of 
the national Catholic bureaucracy offered to buy her station, but the 
70-year-old contemplative nun in leg braces replied to the churchman: 
"I'd blow it up first." True or not, it's the sort of story that 
brings a smile to the lips of her fans and speaks volumes about what 
is going on. It's the stuff of saints, those whom God sends to His 
world and, yes, to His Church on uncomfortable missions: All they 
have to do is say "yes" and He Who is mighty does the rest. Catherine 
of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen must be proud of her. For God, in 
His mysterious ways and times, puts down the mighty and lifts up the 
lowly. In this one old woman--"your third grade nun," as she has been 
described--God has put the Catholic faith into the American media in 
a way that has eluded the national Catholic bureaucracy. And He has 
given a voice to the voiceless, as He has done since the beginning of 
the Good News. Mirabile dictu: "Let him who has ears to hear, hear."

                     *************************

The Rev. Raymond T. Gawronski, S.J., is Assistant Professor of 
Systematic Theology at Marquette, and author of "Word and Silence: 
Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Spiritual Encounter Between East and 
West.> He has recently learned how to operate cable television, and 
also listens to Mother Angelica on the radio.

This article was taken from the April 1996 issue of the "New Oxford 
Review". For subscription information please write: New Oxford 
Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706, 510-526-5374. Published 
monthly except for combined January-February and July-August issues. 
Subscriptions are $19.00 for one year.

Copyright (c) 1996 EWTN

-------------------------------------------------------

   Provided courtesy of:

        Eternal Word Television Network
        PO Box 3610
        Manassas, VA 22110
        Voice: 703-791-2576
        Fax: 703-791-4250
        Data: 703-791-4336
        Web: http://www.ewtn.com
        FTP: ewtn.com
        Telnet: ewtn.com
        Email address: sysop@ ewtn.com

   EWTN provides a Catholic online 
   information and service system.

-------------------------------------------------------

.