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
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