‘Winging It’ 31 March 2007
Posted by frankahilario in 'Mother Knows Best', Mother Angelica, religious broadcasts.add a comment
More on Mother Angelica
Apt image from SemperVirens who captions it ‘Infant Jesus statue’ (flickr.com/). The statue is part of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament at Hanceville, Alabama where we find the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery of Mother Angelica.
(1) ‘Winging it’
Excerpt from John Elson, ‘Mother Knows Best,’ 7 August 1995, TIME, time.com/):
EWTN’s top draw is Mother Angelica, whose twice-weekly shows (with numerous taped repeats) are broadcast from a studio near the Irondale (Our Lady of the Angels) Monastery. Mother Angelica gives new meaning to the phrase ‘winging it.’ On Tuesdays, Mother Angelica Live, scriptless and sometimes armed only with a theme – youthful piety for example – she rambles for 30 minutes or so about whatever enters her wimpled head. On Wednesdays, she chats with guests, usually priests or laymen who share her conservative views; both segments include calls from viewers. In video terms, it’s totally retro, but it works. Says Jesuit Father Thomas Reese of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington: ‘She’s the most successful Catholic TV evangelist since Fulton Sheen in the ‘50s.’
(2) Googler
On 2 September, I googled and got these:
3,830,000, searching for: CBN OR “Christian Broadcasting Network”
1,770,000, searching for: TBN OR “Trinity Broadcasting Network”
0,823,000, searching for: EWTN OR “Eternal Word Television Network”
Which tells me that, among the Top Three Religious TV broadcasting networks, CBN is most popular in the virtual world of the Internet, my favorite EWTN is least popular, and TBN is second most popular. Now, TBN claims to be the world’s largest religious broadcaster – if we take those figures at face value, CBN is the world’s largest religious broadcaster, not TBN.
(3) Practical answers
Excerpt from Catholic Books (2006, catholicshopper.com/):
Through her EWTN television and radio network that now spans the globe, millions of people look to beloved Mother Angelica every day for inspiration and help with the problems of day to day life. Before she founded EWTN, Mother Angelica was author of extremely popular spiritual booklets of which there are more than 20 million in print. This wonderful book (Mother Angelica’s Answers, Not Promises) combines Mother Angelica’s timeless wisdom and insights drawn from her deep faith and personal suffering and experiences to offer practical answers to life’s dilemmas, large and small.
