Mother Angelica, founder of Catholic TV empire, is dead at 92

Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, a Franciscan nun who founded the largest U.S. Catholic television network and one of the largest religious media empires in the world, died on Sunday. She was 92, and her network, the Eternal Word Television Network, attributed her death to complications of a stroke she suffered in late 2001, the same year she retired.

Mother Angelica started EWTN in 1981 in the garage of her monastery in Irondale, Alabama, with $200; she became enamored with the TV medium after appearing on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, and she hosted her own advice and opinion show, Mother Angelica Live, until 2001. EWTN now reaches millions of people in 145 countries and territories through 11 TV networks and other media properties, including 300 radio affiliates, The National Catholic Register newspaper, and the Catholic News Agency.

Mother Angelica was born Rita Rizzo in Canton, Ohio, in 1923. She joined the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration monastery at age 21, then set off to found her own monastery in the outskirts of Birmingham in 1962. Her monastery now has offshoot communities in Texas and Arizona, plus a male Franciscan community in Birmingham.

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Mother Angelica was outspokenly traditionalist, and "she dispensed religious opinions sometimes at odds with Vatican policy," says Paul Vitello at The New York Times. "She lectured teens on fornication, bishops on theology. And at her most passionate, she launched attacks on feminists and other liberals she saw as undermining the authority of the church." Raymond Arroyo, managing editor of EWTN News, notes in the video below that Mother Angelica was also the "only woman in the history of television to found and lead a television network for 20 years." You can learn more about Mother Angelica in Arroyo's remembrance. Peter Weber