Most influential Catholic woman ill

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- Mother Mary Angelica, 78, termed America's most influential Catholic women by Time magazine, is in intensive care after suffering a stroke, her spokesman told United Press International Thursday.

Twenty years after she had founded the Eternal Word Television Network, this "zinging nun," as Time magazine called her, is recovering in a Birmingham, Ala., hospital, said Scott Hults, EWTN's communications director.

Mother Angelica, chairman emeritus of the global non-profit network that reaches 70 million households in 38 countries and territories, underwent surgery on Christmas Eve to have a blood clot removed from her brain.

According to Hults, a previous stroke she had suffered in September had affected her left eye and the left side of her face.

A feisty foe of feminism and liberal Catholicism, Mother Angelica also founded EWTN'S Global Catholic Radio that "reaches a "potential audience of 600 million listeners," Hults announced earlier this year.

The network' Internet viewers are said to number hundreds of millions, including many Protestants.

The Rev. Gerald E. Murray, pastor of St. Vincent de Paul church in Manhattan, told UPI she was a female Billy Graham. "As an evangelist, she is the contemporary equivalent to Bishop Fulton Sheen."

Sheen has been considered the most effective Catholic evangelist in U.S. history.

Mother Angelica is the abbess of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Hanceville, Ala., a shrine built to her specifications in the style of the 13th century.

There are 32 nuns in this cloistered community, belonging to the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, a strict contemplative branch of the Franciscans.

Born Rita Antoinette Rizzo in Canton, Ohio, Mother Angelica once told a Time interviewer that she disliked nuns when she was a child. The sisters teaching her in a parochial school were "the meanest people on earth."

She related how badly she had been treated in her childhood because of her parents' divorce.

Yet she became herself a nun after what she said was a miraculous cure from agonizing stomach pains.

Later, after an accident she faced the possibility of never walking again, Mother Angelica once said. In her prayers, she promised God to build a monastery in the Southern Bible Belt.

She recovered. In 1962, she started a community of cloistered nuns in Irondale, Ala., where Catholics make up only 2 percent of the population. In 1999, the sisters moved into the new Hanceville shrine.

An ardent supporter of Pope John Paul II, the Latin Mass and the traditional teachings on the Eucharist, Mother Angelica does not lack detractors.

In hate messages on the Internet, she has been called freakish and a "deluded old woman (full of) sugar-coated bitchiness ... plain nasty."

Not one for mincing words, she once angrily declared, "I'm tired of inclusive language that refuses to admit that the Son of God is a man. I'm tire of you, liberal church in America. You're sick."

One of her targets was Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles whom she accused of "very bad and poor teaching" about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

In a broadcast, she said, "Never in the history of the world has there been so much blasphemy, disbelief, error, schism and cruelty towards the body and blood of Jesus."

According to the National Catholic Reporter, she added, "The Father is going to make up for this."