Mother Angelica

In 1981, the year after Ted Turner founded CNN, a simple nun using her entrepreneurial instincts and $200 for seed money, launched what would become the world’s largest religious media empire in the garage of a Birmingham, Alabama monastery. Today, EWTN offers twenty-four hours of English and Spanish television programming reaching 105 million viewers around the globe. How did a crippled nun achieve so much and reach so many?

Born Rita Rizzo in Canton, Ohio, in 1923, Mother Angelica was abandoned by her father and raised in poverty by a mother who suffered suicidal depressions. Awakened to the power of prayer, she vowed to dedicate her life to God and become a cloistered nun. She expected to spend her life hidden from the world. But Rita’s faith compelled her to unlikely endeavors, accomplishing what the highest echelon of the Catholic Church could not.

Raymond Arroyo’s engrossing biography traces Mother Angelica’s tortured rise to success and exposes for the first time the fierce opposition she faced, inside and outside of her church. It is an inspiring story of survival and proof that one woman’s faith can move more than mountains.