She had no use for the traditional fire and brimstone but could still instill the fear of God into the heart of a sinner. “Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air and a queasy feeling in the stomach.” “Every moment of life is like God saying, ‘Look, I know you messed up the last moment, but here’s a new one’,” Mother once said.Īt times, she might even seem a little irreverent. This comes through loud and clear in a short collection of her most memorable one-liners assembled by Aleteia. As a result of this incredibly dysfunctional childhood, she acquired a kind of street smarts that never failed to come through in her preaching. But in her heart, she would always be a child of divorce whose mother was mentally unstable and her father abusive. The former Rita Antoinette Rizzo, who was born in 1923 in a ghetto in southeastern Canton, Ohio, would eventually become a Franciscan nun of the Blessed Sacrament. In communicating Christ through television, through radio, through her many books, she was actually communicating a part of herself.” “Her communicating the Gospel was she was really communicating a part of herself, because Christ was so much a part of her and a part of her religious vocation. She knew how to communicate the Gospel in a language that people could understand, not because she was a gift orator, but because she really believed what she was saying. In fact, she had the New Evangelization down pat years before St.
God chooses dodos, and I’m a dodo.”Īnd it’s also why Monsignor Graham Bell, an official of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, told the National Catholic Register that Mother was a “New Evangelizer ante litterum (before her time).” Instead, she said it in a way that all of us “average Joes” in the pews can understand. When it came to preaching the Gospel and encouraging others to do the same, Mother Angelica didn’t choose to quote papal documents or the lofty language of our Church’s finest theologians.
As the Catholic world remembers Mother Angelica, the feisty nun who founded the largest religious communications organization on the planet, it will do us all well to reflect on this first anniversary of her death on how effectively she evangelized just by daring to be herself.
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