Most American Catholics, even those who never watch the Eternal Word Television Network, have been affected by the Alabama-based channel’s three-decade existence. EWTN is an outpost of mainstream, middle American Catholicism—much of it traditionalist. The channel’s founder and figurehead, Mother Angelica, has been the televisual heir to Fulton Sheen.
She is still with the living, but her days as a television fixture are over. Now 88, Mother Angelica, who broadcast her first show in August 1981 from a garage, has retired to an Alabama convent after an incapacitating series of strokes. To this day, however, the network airs reruns of her program, as it does “Life Is Worth Living” by Archbishop Sheen. Legends never go out of style.
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