mother angelica quote all of life is a school of holiness

Both of these things are quite true, of course, but they hardly explained to we Catholics why we should be going to Mass at the Parish and not either attending a non-denominal mega-church or just meditating on Sunday mornings.

Both my generation and that of my children were told repeatedly that 1) Jesus loves us and 2) that we should try to be more like him. The perceived need was to bring Catholics out of the simple faith learned by rote in the “old neighborhoods” and into a more nuanced and reasoned faith more consistent with the modern believer. It is said that Generals are always ready to fight the last war, and I think the same idea holds true with much of the Church hierarchy. But by the late 1960’s, things began to change. In a prior era, our Catholic Bishops, Parish Priests, nuns, brothers, schools and universities had taken the faith that they had received and passed it on to the next generation. But she stood apart from the rest of the sisters in one important way – in 1981 she began broadcasting on cable TV from the garage of her convent, and thus began the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a platform that today may be the largest religious broadcasting organization in existence, said to reach over a quarter-billion souls worldwide.īut as important as that may have been, there was a lot more to her than that. In other words, she was folded into that great number of nuns who were the backbone of the Catholic educational system through at least the 1950s. That was her.įor those not familiar, she was the product of a family damaged by divorce, mental instability and poverty in depression-era Canton, Ohio, and who became a Poor Clare nun in 1945 at the age of 22. Or perhaps you were one of those people flipping through the channels on Cable TV and came across the fat old nun in her stiff black and white religious habit who looked almost like a caricature of the nuns that so many told stories about from their grade school years. Some Catholics were, of course quite familiar with her.

Mother Angelica died five years ago this past week – Ma– at the age of 92.

Mother angelica quote all of life is a school of holiness