Mother Angelica: Her Life Story

Dan O'Neill

As I write this, Mother Angelica has recently turned eighty-two years old. I was mildly surprised to find out she's still alive, but she's soldiering on, as always. O'Neill's thin tome on Mother Angelica's life, published almost twenty years ago, is crying out for a revised-and-updated edition to bring us up to speed on what the woman's been up to for the past two decades besides keeping Mother Angelica Live one of the highest-rated religious programs on television, but the 1986 edition is a halfway decent start.

The book's title accurately reflects it contents: a brief life of Mother Angelica, the Franciscan nun who, if you've been living in a cave for the past quarter-century, made headlines all over the place by starting the Eternal Word Television Network, the first Catholic mouthpiece of its kind. One has to wonder at how accurate some of the reflections are here; O'Neill states more than once that much of the text for the book came from interviews with Mother Angelica, and never mentions doing much legwork to back any of it up. Ironically, Mother Angelica's life reads, in this text, rather like one of the Lives of the Saints which she disparages because they make the saints seem too saintly; "we need to see more of their human side," she says. Such is also the case here. Mother Angelica's pre-convent life is painted as a truly dire set of circumstances, which (aside from trials of faith) makes a complete reversal upon her becoming a nun. Not to say that's not exactly what happened; Mother Angelica spent her childhood and youth during the Great Depression and World War II, and circumstances were dire for many people. But were the convents really that much better off?

The book ends up sounding like your typical tale of inspiration, which probably has much more to do with O'Neill's writing style-- the language used and the sentence structure read more like a young adult biography than one written for the over-18 crowd-- than it has to do with Mother Angelica herself. Still, as far as tales of inspiration go, this one's a pretty easy read. And you can't help but admire the woman.