Mother Mary Angelica

Died: March 27, 2016

MOTHER Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, who has died aged 92, rose from being the daughter of a poor Italian-American family in the US Mid-West to build the world's biggest religious TV empire, reaching around 265 million homes in 145 countries.

As a young nun, she founded the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) to preach Catholicism along the traditional lines of the Vatican and the spirit of St Francis of Assisi. The network began in the garage of a monastery she founded in Alabama, with herself in front of a simple camera and microphone, determined to fight against what she considered blasphemous programmes on American and global secular TV. She had saved $200 to launch her dream. Her network now has a budget of close to $50 million a year, almost all of it from donations.

From that garage "studio" grew EWTN, now with 11 TV channels as well as several newspapers and radio stations, all of them oft-criticised by both liberal and conservative Catholics because of her simple, unbending message and her loyalty to the Pope. Her network made her probably the most influential Roman Catholic woman in the United States and she always put her faith first, before such modern tendencies as feminism.

Rita Antoinette Rizzo was born on April 20, 1923, in Canton, Ohio, to John Rizzo, a tailor and Mae Helen Rizzo (Gianfrancesco), both of them of Italian roots. While a schoolgirl, she was knocked over by a heavy power waxing machine which damaged her spine and forced her to wear leg braces for several years.

After leaving Canton McKinley High School, where she was a drum majorette, she joined the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in 1944 as a nun at their convent in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1962, she realized her vision of starting her own monastery, Our Lady of the Angels in Irondale, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. It was a time of great upheaval in the American deep south as Birmingham became a focal point for the civil rights movement and the Rev Martin Luther King. She herself took on the name Mother Angelica, a name which has since resonated throughout the Roman Catholic world.

In 1981, already in her late 50s, she fulfilled her other dream: in a dusty garage next to the monastery, she set up a small camera on a tripod and began preaching on video tapes. By chance, the music television channel MTV, by cable and satellite, had launched just two weeks earlier and its videos of increasingly scantily-clad girls became a major target of her own speeches.

At first, she paid for slots on local radio and TV programmes but was upset by what she called the blasphemous content of their other programming. After benevolent donations helped her create her own proper studio, she optimistically called her little set-up the Eternal Word Television Network but could have had no idea then that it would blossom into a global phenomenon entering homes by cable or satellite.

In 1999, she moved her monastery from Irondale to Hanceville, also in Alabama, but EWTN remains in the Birmingham suburb. It has offices, and excellent sources, from Rome to Washington DC and in many ways has become almost the official voice of the Roman Catholic Church. After suffering a stroke in 2001, Mother Angelica had to step away from the camera and give up her famous "Mother Angelica Live" broadcasts, although re-runs remain popular, particularly as her health deteriorated in recent months. Seeking donations at the end of her show, she would ask her viewers to remember her right after they paid their electricity and water bills.

Despite her strict Catholic beliefs, Mother Angelica was no old fuddy-duddy. She often appeared on US talk shows and once stole the show on America's Funniest Bloopers, when she showed a video of some of her own most embarrassing TV moments.

Scott Hults, who went on to work with her at EWTN as the network's director of communications, recalled a time when he was working for the fledgling MTV. He was running an MTV booth at a TV convention in Las Vegas while right opposite him, she was manning her own EWTN booth. ''There was this nun in a brown habit handing out brochures,'' Hults said. ''Later I saw her walking down the aisle arm in arm with Ted Turner, the founder of CNN."

Mother Angelica died at 5pm local time on Easter Sunday in her room in Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Hanceville. As she drew her dying breaths, throngs of her followers were attending an Easter prayer service nearby at the monastery's imposing Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. EWTN plans to broadcast her funeral mass at the shrine live on Friday before she is buried in the shrine's crypt church. No details of any living family members were released.

Speaking on Sunday after her death, the governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, said: “On this Easter Sunday, it is only fitting that the Lord chose today to call home one of his humble servants, Mother Angelica. She devoted her life to ministry, converting untold numbers of people to the Church. She left an indelible mark on Alabama, the Catholic Church and the world as a whole.”

PHIL DAVISON