Mother Angelica
The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “In this dramatic page-turner, Raymond Arroyo has captured the life and lessons of Mother Angelica, a woman who may well be the patron saint of CEOs.”—Lee Iacocca, The Iacocca Family Foundation, former CEO of the Chrysler Corporation
In 1981, a simple nun, using merely her entrepreneurial instincts and two hundred dollars, launched what would become the world’s largest religious media empire. In the garage of a Birmingham, Alabama, monastery, the Eternal Word Television Network grew at a staggering pace under her guidance. Mother Angelica (1923–2016) remains on the air, offering faith-filled advice, hope, and laughter to her audience through rebroadcasts of her original homilies. Raymond Arroyo, through more than five years of exclusive interviews with Mother Angelica, traces her tortuous rise to success and exposes for the first time the fierce opposition she faced, both outside and inside her church.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a comprehensive and engaging biography, Arroyo chronicles the life and faith of Mother Angelica, the nun who almost singlehandedly created a religious media empire through her Catholic cable network, EWTN. Born in 1923 to unstable parents (a cruel father who later abandoned the family and a chronically depressed mother), Mother Angelica then called Rita Rizzo is an unlikely person to have redrawn the landscape of Catholicism in America. The strength of Arroyo's biography is what he calls his "unfettered access" to records, associates and the nun herself; as an anchor and news director for EWTN, he's known her for years. But this is not purely a sweetness-and-light portrait; she comes across as outspoken and sometimes hot tempered, arguing with cardinals and even hurling a knife at a sharp-tongued uncle when she was 17. Overall, Arroyo gives a strong sense of the woman who enrages liberals, delights conservatives, but is respected by almost all Catholics.
