Mother Angelica’s life and works prove that her love for Our Lord was genuine: this is precisely why she is an inspiration to Catholic women. Her apostolate in Catholic media, even from the early recordings explaining God’s love for each person, was a bold endeavour to give the masses what the nuns of her childhood had not given her: the empowering knowledge of Jesus’s love for us.

When she was a newly minted nun, she wrote a letter to her mother, addressing her as the mother-in-law of Jesus. The reason that “those nuns” never spoiled her vocation was the same reason she founded EWTN: Jesus chose her to be His bride and she was willing to do anything for Him. One of the most unstoppable nuns to have ever lived in my view, Mother was the only woman to found and run a TV network for 20 years. Mother Angelica became a champion of the same institution that had produced the sadists in black veils who bullied her. I wanted to become a lapsed Catholic and it was only positive encounters with nicer nuns who changed my mind. When I was 14, a nun who was teaching me spent some a lot of class-time shouting at me, “you’re a liar”, after catching me doing my homework in class. I know that I wouldn’t have had the determination. Perhaps it is a miracle in itself that Rita became a nun: it shows amazing strength of character on the part of Mother Angelica that she did not let fear that she would might become like the nuns from her childhood crush her vocation. Raymond Arroyo’s biography quotes Mother Angelica as remembering that the toy “was old and scratched, had knots in it, you couldn’t use the thing.” When Rita grew up to become Mother Angelica she would always say that she hated “those nuns” and was clear that they could and should have told her that Jesus loved her. After a priest cajoled and persuaded little Rita’s mother to send her back to the convent school, the same nuns singled Rita out for more of the same.Īt the Christmas party, they gave shiny new toys to all the other kids, but reserved a broken yo-yo for Rita. Back in the 1930s when Mother Angelica was Rita Rizzo, her mother took her out of a convent school because the nuns belittled her.

Quotes by Mother Angelica