Author: Raymond Arroyo
Hardcover, 6.2 x 9.6 inches, 400 pages.

Book Notes

The extraordinary saga of Mother Angelica, founder of the multi-million-dollar Eternal Word Television Network and "the Most Influential Catholic Woman in America," according to TIME magazine.

In 1981, the year after Ted Turner founded CNN, a simple nun, using merely her entrepreneurial instincts and two hundred dollars, launches what would become the world's largest religious media empire in the garage of a Birmingham, Alabama, monastery. Under her guidance, the Eternal Word Television Network grew at a staggering pace, both in viewership and in influence, to where it now reaches over a hundred million viewers in hundreds of countries around the globe.

Born Rita Rizzo in Canton, Ohio, in 1923, Mother Angelica was abandoned by her father and raised in poverty by a mother who suffered from suicidal depressions. As a young woman, Rita developed severe abdominal pain that doctors dismisses as a "nervous condition," but when she sought the prayers of a local mystic, her symptoms disppeared. Awakened to the power of prayer, she vowed to dedicate her life to God and became a cloistered nun, expecting to spend her life hidden from the world. But Rita's faith soon compelled her to unlikely endeavors, from establishing a monastery in Alabama to starting the world's first Catholic cable network. Relying solely on "God's providence," Mother Angelica built an empire without concern for budgets or fund-raising campaigns, achieving what even the highest levels of the Catholic Church had been unable to do.

Raymond Arroyo combines his journalist's objectivity and eye for detail with more than five years of exclusive interviews with Mother Angelica. He traces her tortured rise to success and exposes for the first times the fierce opposition she faced, both 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.