Mother Mary Angelica, Who Founded Catholic TV Network, Dies at 92

Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, a cloistered Franciscan nun and media entrepreneur who founded the largest Roman Catholic television network in the country, and used it unstintingly to criticize liberalizing trends in the Catholic Church, died on March 27. She was 92. The cause was complications of a stroke, according to a statement posted online by the Eternal Word Television Network, the media organization she founded.

Mother Angelica launched the Eternal Word Television Network in 1981 with $200, a makeshift studio in a monastery’s garage in Irondale (AL) and one on-air personality, herself. By the time she retired in 2001 after a series of debilitating strokes, her homespun half-hour program of advice and commentary, “Mother Angelica Live,” was the anchor of a 24-hour Catholic programming network reaching over 100 million homes in the United States, South America, Africa and Europe. In a YouTube video announcing her death, Raymond Arroyo, the managing editor of EWTN News and a biographer of Mother Angelica, said she was the only woman in television history to found and lead a cable network for 20 years. A 1995 profile in Time magazine called her “an improbable superstar of religious broadcasting and arguably the most influential Roman Catholic woman in America.”