Mother Angelica, one of the most significant figures in the post-conciliar Catholic Church in America, has died after a fourteen-year struggle with the after-effects of a stroke. I can attest that, in "fashionable" Catholic circles during the eighties and nineties of the last century, it was almost de rigueur to make fun of Mother Angelica.
She was a crude popularizer, an opponent of Vatican II, an arch-conservative, and a culture-warrior. And yet while her critics have largely faded away, her impact and influence are incontestable. Against all odds and expectations, she created an evangelical vehicle without equal in the history of the Catholic Church. Starting from a garage in Alabama, EWTN now reaches 230 million homes in over 140 countries around the world. With the possible exception of John Paul II himself, she was the most watched and most effective Catholic evangelizer of the last fifty years.
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