On a day like today, March 27, 2016, at sunset, our dear Mother Angelica of the Annunciation, a Poor Clare nun and founder of the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), which has become the largest Catholic media conglomerate in the world, passed away at the age of 92 after a 15-year struggle with the aftermath of a stroke.
Mother Angelica passed away around 5:00 p.m. “Mother Angelica. A holy woman,” said Pope Francis about the EWTN founder on July 5, 2016. Rita Rizzo, the name given to Mother Angelica by her parents, was born on April 20, 1923, in the city of Canton, Ohio, United States. Her life was marked by many trials, such as her parents’ divorce when she was six years old and the poverty she faced with her mother.
As a teenager, she was healed of severe stomach pain after praying a novena to Saint Therese of Lisieux. “That was the day I realized God’s love for me and began to thirst for Him,” said Mother Angelica. On August 15, 1944, at the age of 21, she entered the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in Cleveland, Ohio, and took the name Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation.
In the 1950s, she had an accident that caused a back injury. Two years later, doctors told her she could lose the use of her legs. Mother Angelica then promised God that if He healed her, she would build a monastery in the southern United States. The nun was healed, and on February 3, 1961, Rome gave her permission to found the Monastery of Our Lady of the Angels in Irondale, Alabama, at a time when the Catholic population in the region was only 2%.
Over the years, Mother Angelica became known as a charismatic evangelist. But in 1978, after learning that the secular station where she worked was planning to air a program that she felt was blasphemous, she resigned and decided to start her own station.
On August 15, 1981, Mother Angelica launched EWTN from the garage of the religious house, with approximately 20 employees. With 42 years, EWTN is the largest Catholic media organization in the world. EWTN’s 11 global TV channels and its numerous regional channels broadcast in multiple languages 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to over 400 million households in more than 160 countries and territories.
EWTN platforms include radio services broadcast through SIRIUS/XM, iHeart Radio, and over 600 radio affiliates in the United States and the world on AM and FM; a worldwide shortwave radio service; one of the most visited Catholic websites in the United States; and EWTN Publishing, its book publishing division. Based in Washington, D.C., EWTN News operates multiple news services that include Catholic News Agency, the National Catholic Register newspaper and digital platform, ACI Prensa in Spanish, ACI Digital in Portuguese, ACI Stampa in Italian, ACI Africa in English, French, and Portuguese; ACI MENA in Arabic, CNA Deutsch in German; and ChurchPop, a digital platform that creates content in various languages.
It also produces numerous television news programs such as EWTN News Nightly, EWTN News In Depth, EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, The World Over, EWTN Noticias, and others.
