How did Rita Rizzo, the sickly girl who, with only a high school diploma, fights her way out of poverty and single handedly creates the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the largest religious broadcasting empire in the world – succeed where all the bishops of the United States (and several millionaires had failed)?
This new biography by Raymond Arroyo comes closer than anyone has yet done to explaining Mother Angelica – The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles (Doubleday, 2005, $23.95). It is a welcome sign of the burgeoning Catholic book market's coming of age when a prestigious house such as Doubleday picks up this biography and heavily markets it.
Arroyo is well known to many of our readers. He is host and creator of "The World Over Live" on EWTN, and has a solid resume in network and cable television. This book is based on exclusive interviews conducted in the years before Mother Angelica's incapacitating strokes, and is full of surprising insights into her life, both interior and exterior.
As Arroyo puts it, "One evening before shooting her live show, she gave me but one instruction, which has haunted me to this day: 'Make sure you present the real me. There is nothing worse than a book that sugarcoats the truth and ducks the humanity of the person. I wish you 40 years in purgatory if you do that!'" Based on my reading, Raymond need not worry about the Calabresan curse of the extra 40 years. Arroyo says: "I have written a book that does not avoid controversy or the seeming contradictions inherent in Mother Angelica's character: the cloistered contemplative nun who speaks to the world; the independent rule breaker who is derided as a 'rigid' conservative; the wisecracking comedian who suffers near constant pain; the Poor Clare nun who runs a multimillion-dollar corporation."
The first part of the book discloses the early life of Rita Rizzo, an only child from a severely dysfunctional family in a poor Italian neighborhood in eastern Ohio. Her father was an absent good-for-nothing, her mother hysterical and dependent upon Rita's mothering. In her late teens, the religiously unmotivated Rita encounters a questionable mystic/stigmatic who discerns her vocation and encourages her entry into a Poor Clare Monastery in Cleveland, against severe family opposition. In this account of her rather dismal early years, Arroyo uncovers only one hint of great things to come, captured in a photograph of the young Rita Rizzo prancing with "sass and spunk" as the first female majorette at McKinley High in 1939. You can almost hear "If They Could See Me Now" in the background. This woman was born to lead, but who could have imagined what God had in store for her?
Several years' work follows high school, and then the cloister swallows her up as a bride of Christ. Before long, she enters the forge of intense physical suffering that continues to this day. Accompanying that suffering is schooling in contemplative prayer, and out of the two comes what can only be described as the "miracle" of EWTN and the splendid Poor Clare monastery she founded in the middle of the Bible Belt. How Flannery O'Connor, America's greatest Catholic storyteller, and a daughter of the Deep South, would have enjoyed all of this.
The story of Sister Angelica's time in the monastery in Cleveland and then later in nearby Canton, Ohio, is full of the reality of community life, reminiscent of St. Therese of Lisieux's The Story of a Soul. Someone with the temperament and personality of Angelica (perhaps not the most apt religious name for her) would naturally clash with some of her fellow sisters and superiors.
Eventually her good and kind nature, combined with her high intelli
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