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Mother
Angelica: Healed & Reviled
from the March-April 1998 issue
For more than forty years Mother Mary
Angelica, foundress and leader of the Eternal Word
Television Network (EWTN) was in constant physical pain
because of a chronic spinal condition. Although many of
her viewers never realized the extent of her suffering
because of the humor and joy she exudes on her weekly
television programs, she was encumbered by a back brace,
leg braces and chronic asthma.
While praying the Holy Rosary in her
office with a recent visitor, she experienced an unusual
healing. The visitor asked her to remove the braces from
her legs and to try to walk without her crutches. Mother
later explained that a heat came over her ankles.
"Every time I walked back and forth," she said,
"my legs started coming in straight." She was
able to walk without her crutches for the first time in
over forty years. So too her spinal injury seems to have
been fully healed; she no longer needs her back brace.
And her asthma? That seems to be gone too, she remarked.
As a young novice, Sr. Angelica was
injured in an accident that left her partially paralyzed
for a short time and unable to walk without crutches
until this year. "I have never asked to be healed.
To me it was part of my mission," Mother Angelica
stated on one of EWTN’s programs the following day.
Coincidence?
The timing of her unusual, perhaps miraculous, healing is
worth noting. For the past few months Mother has been
bitterly criticized by members of the Catholic press,
bishops, and priests for her public criticism of Cardinal
Roger Mahony’s pastoral letter on the liturgy,
"Gather Faithfully Together: A Guide for Sunday
Mass" (September 4, 1997). In that letter the
cardinal encourages Los Angeles Catholics to
"celebrate the diverse experiences, cultures, and
charisms that assemble around the one table" of the
Mass. He offers practical liturgical directives that are,
at best, contrary to the spirit of the norms of the
Church, and according to some, the liturgical innovations
he outlines are likely to cause further confusion about
the nature of the Mass, especially the fundamental
doctrine of the Real Presence.
On her cable television program,
"Mother Angelica Live," Mother expressed her
opinion that the cardinal’s letter was an example of
the increasing secularization of the Church today, that
it confused Catholics about the Real Presence of Christ
in the Eucharist, and added, "I’m afraid my
obedience in that diocese would be absolutely zero. And I
hope everybody else’s in that diocese is zero."
Cardinal Mahony responded immediately to her remarks. He
demanded a public apology, which Mother delivered the
next week. However, the evening that she offered the
apology she continued with her critique, calling the
letter "confusing." In the text of the pastoral
letter "the word ‘presence’ is used,"
said Mother, "but it never says ‘Real
Presence’… it’s a presence of the
community, the assembly, the general presence of God in
the liturgy, and the presence of the bishop. It
doesn’t talk about the presence of Jesus, Body,
Blood, Soul, or the transubstantiation."
Cardinal Mahony was not satisfied with
her apology; in fact, he was further incensed. This time
he not only demanded a retraction from her—he
specified the retraction was to be written by her bishop,
David Foley of Birmingham, and read on four different
occasions—he threatened Mother with legal action by
taking counsel with canon and civil lawyers. The cardinal
is claiming that no one has the right to criticize his
pastoral letter. In his letter to Mother, he referred to
Canon 753, which obliges Catholics to respect the
teaching office of the diocesan bishop. It also specifies
that only the pope may correct a bishop’s teaching.
He did not, however, acknowledge Canon 212 which
addresses the "right, indeed at times the duty"
of the faithful to manifest to the sacred pastors their
views on matters which concern the good of the Church,
and to "make these views known to all of
Christ’s faithful."
A need for clarity
Writing in the Diocese of Youngstown’s newspaper,
the Catholic Exponent, Bishop Thomas Tobin stated:
"The misunderstanding of Cardinal Mahony’s
letter by some reminds us also of the need to be very
clear in teaching the Catholic Faith. [The Cardinal]
points out that the traditional Catholic doctrine about
the Eucharist is contained in the very first footnote of
the letter." But Tobin emphasized that "the
fact that the primary teaching of the Church about the
Eucharist has been relegated to a footnote is itself very
disturbing to some… The faithful need and deserve a
solid and unambiguous doctrinal foundation on which to
build their Christian lives."
Bishop Tobin wondered what drives
Mother Angelica and others to be so critical of bishops
and cardinals of the Church. "Could it be that some
members of the Church have become so outspoken, even
defiant," he suggested, "because their
legitimate complaints about abuses in the Church have not
been taken seriously by Church leaders? Their concern
about fuzzy teaching or liturgical aberrations have too
often been neglected, sometimes even belittled…
Church leaders need to address well-founded complaints
seriously, or we will continue to see the marginalization
of many good people who just care about the spiritual
well-being of the Church."
Many U.S. bishops and priests have not
only "belittled" Mother Angelica, they have
actively sought to have EWTN’s programming yanked
from local cable networks. In 1994, Archbishop Rembert
Weakland led the Catholic crusade to rid Milwaukee
airwaves of Mother Angelica. Likewise Emil Wcela,
auxiliary bishop of Rockville Center led a similar
campaign on Long Island, New York. (Weakland’s
diocesan newspaper even rejected running a photograph of
Mother in an EWTN ad because she was clothed in a
traditional habit).
And now Cardinal Mahony has taken his
complaints to the Vatican. The National Catholic
Reporter (NCR) reported that the cardinal intends to
demand fundamental changes in both the management style
and the on-air tone of the "controversial Catholic
media outlet." NCR quoted Mahony’s director of
media relations as saying, "the cardinal wants the
Holy See to do something about Mother Angelica’s
whole attitude that she is not responsible to the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops or to any of the
individual bishops. It goes beyond her criticism of the
cardinal—it’s about how the network operates
and to whom it is accountable."
NCR writes that "Mahony now
appears to want more than a retraction from the TV nun.
According to sources close to Mahony, he believes EWTN
should be reoriented so it plays what he feels is a
positive role in the church’s evangelization efforts
and cooperates with the U.S. bishops in how it goes about
that task."
Clearly then, if what NCR has reported
is true, Cardinal Mahony would like to co-opt what Mother
Angelica has made successful and turn it into an
ecclesiastical mouthpiece for the American-Catholic
bureaucracy. EWTN’s straight-up orthodoxy, their
reverently-celebrated televised Masses, traditional
understanding of Catholic doctrine, culture and
discipline has most obviously drawn the ire of not a few
American bishops. That is an accomplishment in and of
itself, considering that dissident Catholic publications,
many of which are bitterly critical of the pope and
bishops, continue to publish unfettered by the likes of
the certain U.S. bishops in question. In short, EWTN has
drawn censure and sanction for teaching as
"Catholic" what the Church teaches. The network
is not the Church, but an instrument of the Church. Even
so, many bishops appear unhappy with this particular
instrument.
In January, for instance, Los
Angeles Lay Catholic Mission reported on a letter
sent to Mother Angelica from Bishop Robert Lynch of St.
Petersburg, Florida. Bishop Lynch, former secretary for
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in his
November 19, 1997 letter: "I pray that you will
cease these personal and vicious attacks on those whom
the Successor of Peter has chosen to lead the Church at
this time." The bishop added, "you and your
network are not helping me in my office as Shepherd,
Pastor and Leader." One might wonder: why the
protest from bishops such as Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop
Weakland and Bishop Lynch?
Doing the bishops’ job
EWTN is likely the world’s largest religious cable
broadcasting network, with more than 1,600 affiliates
reaching 54 million homes in 34 different countries.
Under Mother Angelica’s leadership, EWTN has
accomplished what the bishops of the United States have
failed to do—and they have indeed tried and failed:
to provide a significant Catholic presence on television.
Even so, some bishops are unwilling to admit the
accomplishment. Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati
wrote to one St. Catherine Review reader that EWTN
is not "Catholic." Rather, he states,
"Mother Angelica appears to be pleased by her
independence that allows her to criticize bishops that do
not agree with her. Many bishops appear to be equally
pleased to be independent of Mother Angelica."
More to the point, however, the bishops
and Catholic bureaucrats resent her exposing their
modernist methods. Mother has always claimed that it is
her mission to bring the true light of the faith to the
common man, to the broken-hearted who want to hear the
unchanging truth of Jesus Christ instead of being
subjected to personal speculation, liturgical abuses,
doctrinal deviations, and sex education. As Bishop Tobin
of Youngstown wrote, "Church leaders need to address
well-founded complaints seriously."
In a 1994 interview with Thomas
Droleskey of The Wanderer, Mother Angelica
"went to great lengths to explain that she loves and
prays for the bishops; what angers her is that some of
Christ’s shepherds are not faithful to the Holy
Father. They remain in communion with him juridically,
while doing everything possible to undermine his teaching
authority—permitting dissidents to preach, to teach,
to write, and to hold positions whereby they can browbeat
the ‘little people’ who simply want to lead
holy lives… The very ones who say non servium est
[I will not serve] to the Holy Father expect
absolute, unyielding obedience to their edicts.
‘That’s the wrong type of obedience,’
Mother Angelica declared. ‘Souls are being snatched
by these wolves, preying upon people brought up to
obey.’ But one ‘who is not in union with the Magisterium
must not be obeyed!’" How many American
bishops, one wonders, would approve of St. Catherine of
Siena were she to live today as a so-called
"TV-nun?"
Well done faithful servant?
There are perhaps many conclusions that can be drawn from
Mother Angelica’s unusual healing, especially
considering that it occurred after forty years of great
suffering, during a time when a prince of the Church is
appealing to Rome to have her censured and punished. One
possible conclusion is that Christ has rewarded Mother
for her commitment to the truth. Might He be saying,
"Well done faithful servant"?
But others, those who hold Mother and
her network in contempt, will busy themselves trying to
explain away the unusual occurrence. Tricia Hempel,
editor of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph wrote in her Feb 20 issue that her paper
will not report on Mother Angelica’s healing until
it has been ruled a "miracle" by the proper
Vatican congregation. Even the U.S. bishops’ agency,
Catholic News Service (CNS), prepared a full page story
on the remarkable incident. Although the Catholic
Telegraph uses the CNS service, they chose not to
publicize the healing. Other diocesan papers, however,
did run the story.
This is not surprising. The same
editor, Mrs. Hempel, once told this writer that she
isn’t going to give Mother Angelica any more
publicity than she already gets. "She’s got
more money than God!" complained Mrs. Hempel.
The cause of the EWTN success
Mother Angelica does not attribute her network’s
great success to her own talents and
persistence—although many others would; she gives
all the glory to God, the prayers of her community, and
perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at her
monastery in Irondale, Alabama. Indeed the two pillars of
EWTN’s efforts are profound Eucharistic piety and a
great devotion to the Mother of God. Mother’s
sisters, brothers and priests are first and foremost
contemplatives. Their vocation is to the religious life.
Their mission is to bring true Church teaching to the
common people through the media.–Michael S. Rose
For an excellent critique of
Cardinal Mahony’s pastoral letter on the liturgy,
see the ADOREMUS Statement on "Gather Faithfully
Together" in the November, 1997 issue of the
ADOREMUS Bulletin (www.adoremus.org): P.O. Box 5858, Arlington VA, 22205.
Copies of Cardinal Mahony’s
pastoral letter, "Gather Faithfully Together,"
are available for $5 from Liturgy Training Publications,
1800 N. Hermitage Ave., Chicago IL 60622-1101. It is also
available on the World Wide Web: http://www.la-archdiocese.org
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