Tom Hoopes
This is the fourth part of a four part series about Mother Angelica. For the rest of the article, click the following links for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Suffering With God
In my day spent at EWTN, I began to see that Mother Angelica’s spirituality goes much deeper than the externals that had tripped me up.
I heard it first from Samuel F. Carnley in accounting when I asked him about the legend that EWTN refuses to use a budget. He didn’t answer directly but noted that the accounting he does is “not a bottom-line approach.” What other kind of accounting is there? “We operate on a model of stewardship,” he said. “We count on the donors to answer God’s call.”
Deacon Steltemeier elaborated. “The Lord told Mother, ‘Get it up there and I’ll take care of the rest.’” So Mother got the signal going, and then demurred from grand fundraising schemes, telethons, and the like. She simply asked listeners to “think of us in between your light bill and your gas bill.” And they responded.
“The listeners realized that Mother loved them,” Steltemeier said. “They could see that Mother loves them. The power of the Lord’s love compels us to do what God wants us to do. That’s dynamite stuff.”
Behind the feisty demeanor, pain and suffering, obedience and faith have been the constants in Mother Angelica’s life. It’s as if at each stage of her life, God took a strange pleasure in calling her to do something big, throwing an impossible obstacle in her way, then watching her do it anyway.
When she was trying to be a little girl, He watched her lose her family. When she was trying to be a contemplative nun, He allowed her to develop a swelling condition in her knees that made it impossible to kneel and almost cost her a place in the convent. Before calling her to lead crews in building an unprecedented monastery in the deep South, God watched her lose the ability to walk in a freak accident.
When she tried to serve the Church with a worldwide cable television network that inspired countless conversions, prominent bishops tried to shut her down. And after she built her own wildly successful talk show into a media empire, God took away her ability to communicate.
The jolly nun who spoke as much with her warm grin and mischievous winks as with her frank words is now all but unable to speak.
“He expects me to operate, if I don’t have the money, if I don’t have the brains, if I don’t have the talent — in faith,” she told Arroyo. “You know what faith is? Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach.”
Hers is a prime example of the spirituality of suffering that historians will likely use to define the Catholicism of the 20th Century, despite so many attempts by Catholics to blaze easier spiritual paths.
One thinks of the stigmatist Padre Pio, whose shrine is the most visited in the world, but whose name is rarely mentioned in homilies. Or Mother Teresa, who spent decades in spiritual darkness. St. Faustina, St. Gianna Molla, Edith Stein — what so many of these modern saints have in common is that their causes were advanced by John Paul II, the suffering pope. Like Mother Angelica, he too lost his family, then his mobility, then his speech — and left an enormous mark on the world.
People who undergo suffering on this scale are usually crushed by it. But those who accept these blows as ways to commune with God open up channels of grace capable of moving mountains.
Thus, EWTN stands as more than a monument to the charism and powers of one woman — though Mother Angelica’s charismatic powers certainly didn’t hurt.
“EWTN is God’s network,” said Warsaw.
He once asked Mother what her legacy would be. She didn’t mention the number of TV households, the facilities, the radio signals that span the globe, or any of the rest of it. She didn’t mention the conversions people attribute to her work, or the enormous shrine that rises like Assisi’s cathedral in the middle of a Hanceville, Alabama, field. Her legacy? “That all we did in all of this was rely on the Lord’s providence.”
“You want to do something for the Lord?” Mother once asked. “Do it. Whatever you feel needs to be done, even though you’re shaking in your boots, you’re scared to death — take the first step forward. The grace comes with that one step and you get the grace as you step. Being afraid is not a problem; it’s doing nothing when you’re afraid.”
Deacon Steltemeier described her life now. “She prays and suffers for the Church and for the world and for EWTN. That’s all she does. And she’s happy. If you see her you just melt with joy. She’s prayerful, childlike, loving.”
Then he left me with one caution about my article.
“Don’t just talk about the suffering,” he said. “Talk about love. It’s love that bears fruit.”
Tom Hoopes is executive editor of the National Catholic Register, and, with his wife April, editorial director of Faith & Family magazine.
- (This article is courtesy of Crisis Magazine. This data file is the sole property of of the copyright holder, Crisis Magazine.)
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