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Mother Angelica: Foundress of EWTN

Articles, Catholic250, The Catholic Patriotic Minute, Video | December 29, 2025 | by Catholics for Catholics

The Catholic Patriotic Minute #26: Mother Angelica
Catholics For Catholics Special Edition | December 29th, 2025

Mother Angelica: Foundress of EWTN

On January 2, Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation made her first and final vows as a Poor Clare nun in 1947 and 1953 respectively. Her legacy is rooted in her establishment of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Irondale, Alabama, as well as her founding of EWTN, which reached 265 million homes worldwide by the time of her death. Her gift of spiritually loving the millions, who asked her questions about Catholic teaching and personal struggles, so many of whom suffered, was shaped not only by her own distressed childhood but also by a miracle.

On April 20, 1923, Rita Antoinette Rizzo was born in Canton, Ohio. Right after she was baptized in September of the same year, her mother Mae brought her to the side altar devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows. Later, Mae would recount that she told the Blessed Mother, “I give you my daughter”. Baby Rita would certainly need the protection of Our Lady of Sorrows throughout her subsequent, turbulent childhood.

Her father, John Rizzo, did not want Rita. Just four years earlier, Mae married John with the hopes of beginning a new chapter after a childhood of feeling ignorant. Although John appeared promising in 1919, he spent the remainder of their marriage abusing Mae verbally and physically. He could not keep a job and left their home when Rita was five. Even though Mae still cared for John, she filed for a divorce from John when Rita was seven and remained emotionally inconsolable. Their financial troubles deepened with the Great Depression.

Mother Angelica would later acknowledge, “Sometimes I used to wonder if there was a God, and if there was such a person I couldn’t figure out why He wouldn’t let me have a family, like the other kids.” By the age of eleven, Rita started caring for Mae as a mother figure, as Mae could not move past her depression and even mentioned suicide multiple times. By the time she graduated from high school, Rita persuaded her mother to seek out a city job–something Mae achieved–while applying for employment herself and quietly struggling with a stomach disorder.

When the United States entered the Second World War, Rita began work as a secretary in advertising. For the next year, Rita could barely eat crackers and drink tea. She wore a medical corset. Inspired by Catholic mystic Rhoda Wise, Rita prayed a novena to Saint Thérèse and, on the ninth day of the novena on January 17, 1943, was healed from her stomach disorder when the large lump on her abdomen disappeared as well as the blue tint on her stomach. In gratitude, Rita prayed the Way of the Cross regularly. By her bed, she set up an altar with statues of the Blessed Mother and the Sacred Heart and images of the Infant of Prague and Saint Thérèse.

After this healing, Rita’s primary love became Christ, instead of her mother. On August 15, 1944, the feast of Mary’s Assumption, Rita left home for the Adoration Monastery in Cleveland, Ohio. Rather than telling Mae in person, Rita left her a letter. She wrote to Mae, “[Christ] wants to be first in your heart. You have put me before Him in the past. . . but attach yourself to God alone who is patiently waiting for all your love.”

Loving Christ without abandon led to Rita desiring to be Christ’s Spouse. She wrote,

“[a] cloister, my mother is a heaven on earth. . . Something happened to me after my cure. What it was I don’t know. I fell completely in love with Our Lord. To live in the world for the past 19 months has been very difficult. . . I am not of the world.”

She joined the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, and at the Adoration Monastery she formed her Franscican spirituality by living a disciplined life according to their rule of life and by reading Lives of the Saint. On November 8, 1945, Rita became Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation. She took her final vows on January 2, 1953.

In 1953, Sister Angelica also had an accident, when she fell on her back. She suffered from back pain for the following three years. Faced with a surgery with a fifty-percent chance Sister Angelica would never walk again, she prayed, “Lord, if you let me walk again, I’ll build you a monastery in the South.” The year 1956 in the United States consisted of extreme racial tension, and Sister Angelica wanted to form a “heaven on earth,” a cloister, for those socially suppressed in the South. God answered her prayer, and so Sister Angelica got right to work.

Due to donations and profits from the sisters’ businesses selling fishing lures and roasted peanuts, Mother Angelica and four sisters moved to the South and established Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, in 1962. In the 1970’s, Mother Angelica came to be known by people across America and the world before her launch of EWTN in 1982. By recommendation of the bishop of Birmingham, Mother Angelica taught scripture courses outside her cloister, and these lessons soon became audiotapes, which later became books. She wrote fifty-six books and mini-books, and fifteen-million copies were distributed worldwide. Mother Angelica was subsequently invited to televised interviews. In a Chicago studio one day, she looked around and famously exclaimed, “Lord, I gotta have one of these!”

In 2001, Mother Angelica lost her speech after two major strokes. From 2002 till 2016, she lived bedridden, in contemplative prayer. A statue of the Child Jesus was set by her bed, just as the Infant of Prague rested by her childhood bed after her first healing in 1943. Mother Angelica passed away on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016.

From her monastery’s garage, Mother launched Eternal Word Television Network– the United States’ first Catholic satellite television station–with only two-hundred dollars saved in 1981. From 1983 to 2001, Mother Angelica provided spiritual guidance, through her popular talk show “Mother Angelica Live,” which touched the hearts of millions worldwide. Her show reached sixty-million homes across the world by 2001. Before the end of her public life in 2001, Mother Angelica founded the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament at her monastery in 1999, after the Child Jesus told her in prayer, “Build Me a Temple and I will help those who help you.”