Title: Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles
Author: Raymond Arroyo
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385510926
Pro:
• Humanizes an otherwise controversial figure
Con:
• More hagiography than biography
• Not nearly as critical and objective as it might like to be
Description:
• “Unauthorized” biography, created with extensive help from the subject
• Describes the life of Rita Rizzo, later Mother Angelica, founder of EWTN
• Tends to focus heavily on business dealings with Eternal World Television Network
Book Review
Although there are many critics of Mother Angelica’s demeanor, actions, and views, there doesn’t appear to be a great deal of information about her life — especially her early life before becoming a nun. Raymond Arroyo seeks to rectify this with his biography of Angelica, Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles.
Most interesting in the book is his discussion of her early life in poverty with a highly dependent mother who simply couldn’t get by without her daughter, Rita Rizzo. This created a dysfunctional relationship that would affect both of them for the rest of their lives. Against all the odds, however, she managed to create a massive television network that reaches millions of people all around the world.
Author Raymond Arroyo is about as much of an insider of EWTN and one Mother Angelica’s associates as you can get. He is the news director and a lead anchor at EWTN who has been close to Angelica for years. In order to allay criticism that this is simply a fawning biography, it is described as presenting Angelica “warts and all” — in fact, Arroyo quotes Angelica as demanding exactly that from his work.
This, however, should be treated with a great deal of skepticism. Most of the time, the “warts” being described remind me of how one is supposed to answer questions like “what is your greatest fault” during job interview. If your “greatest fault” is, for example, being too much of a perfectionist, you can turn a “fault” into a virtue.
Similarly, so many of Angelica’s “warts” are described in ways that allow them to be perceived as “virtues” — for example, she is too impatient with doing the work of the Lord, too steadfast in upholding orthodoxy against even those within the church, and too strong-willed when dealing with attacks from powerful religious interests. The only flaws that aren’t subtly portrayed as virtues involve her behavior as a youth, long before she became a nun. Even then, though, situations are framed in manner that makes it easy to excuse that behavior — her life was undeniably hard and she suffered a great deal because of those around her.
In the end, this so-called “warts and all” biography is far closer to a hagiography than a critical and engaged treatment of the life of one of the most influential Catholics in recent American history. Readers are continually regaled with her struggles with various pains — and while it’s clear that she did contend with a variety of ailments, is that a reason to beat us over the head with how her struggles were representative of Christ’s own suffering?
I doubt that Arroyo hasn’t thought about the possibility that a woman of her stature among conservative Catholics is likely to be suggested as a candidate for sainthood, and therefore I doubt that his own possible role in this has escaped his notice. This first book about her life will likely play an important role because of Arroyo’s extensive personal interviews with Mother Angelica before strokes removed her ability to communicate effectively. He spend five years retracing her life, both through his own research and through talks with Angelica, and those talks represent her final wishes on what she wanted the world to know about her.
Unfortunately, we learn far more about her business decisions and prayers for greater financing than about her personal views on faith, doubt, Catholic dogma, or Christian history. Perhaps this was deliberate on her part, I don’t know; but in the end the fact that this reads more like hagiography than “warts and all” biography cannot be regarded as accidental. It will surely please the Catholic faithful and some of the information about her early life should interest even Angelica’s critics, but I wouldn’t recommend starting the book with expectations set too high.
