The multimillion-dollar empire is sustained by thousands of monthly small donations from the devout, and its studio audiences are bussed in to the channel’s headquarters in the countryside outside Birmingham, Alabama, each day from all over the US. Now her theme is reinforced by a cadre of priests preaching similar messages, and programme schedules are bulked out with broadcast masses and devotional documentaries. If her conversational style was folksy and informal, her grin was grim and her finger would wag menacingly as she laid into the “anti-God, anti-Catholic and pagan ways” allegedly infiltrating Catholicism, including the supposed blasphemy of supporting women’s ordination and married priests, “everything God does not want”. Its reach incorporates radio and the internet, as well as television, and it has also taken over the US weekly newspaper the National Catholic Register and the Catholic News Agency.Īngelica, dressed in the traditional black nun’s habit and white wimple given up by most American nuns decades ago, and gazing owlishly into the camera through large spectacles, berated the liberalism and blasphemy she believed to be infecting the church. EWTN currently broadcasts in English, Spanish and occasionally German, 24 hours a day, on satellite channels in more than 140 countries, and has a potential Catholic audience of 250 million households.
Preaching a profoundly reactionary message in twice-weekly homilies from her television studio in deepest Alabama, Angelica, who has died aged 92, probably reached more people than any other religious leader on earth, with the possible exception of the pope.Įven after she was silenced by a stroke in 2001, her station, EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network), continued to broadcast her previous homilies, originally preached 20 and 30 years earlier to studio audiences dressed in flares and floral patterns. Mother Angelica, the nun who founded a worldwide broadcasting empire, had a strong claim to be the most influential Catholic woman in the US, and possibly the world.
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