One Miserable Life

Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles
by Raymond Arroyo

In 1981, a simple nun, using merely her entrepreneurial instincts and $200, launched 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.

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

Chapter 1

Mother Angelica came into the world overlooked and certainly unwanted, at least by her father. She was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo in the unassuming town of Canton, Ohio, on April 20, 1923.

Aside from being the birthplace of President William McKinley, Canton was a forgotten industrial hamlet an hour or so outside of Cleveland. Great scattering streaks of brown smoke billowed from her chimney-dotted skyline, an emblem of the productivity issuing from the little town. Steel was the backbone of Canton: the building block of the new century and the lure for thousands of immigrants. From Canton's mills and production lines spilled the ball bearings, streetcars, bricks, telephones, and pipe fittings that would propel the nation into its greatest period.

Apart from the industry, Canton was, as it is today, a pleasant green pasture of rolling hills in the middle of the country, a place to raise a family and avoid the chaos and congestion of city life. That is, unless you lived in the southeast part of town, where Rita Rizzo was born.

In 1923, southeast Canton was known as the red-light district, or "the slums," according to some. For the blacks and hordes of Italian immigrants who worked in the Canton mills, the southeast was home. Italians were confined to the district by a combination of illiteracy and the constant tribute demanded by their wayward countrymen. It was a ghetto ruled by the Black Hand, a criminal organization with roots in Sicily. And though the mobsters carried black-handled revolvers as they conducted business in the neighborhood, the name Black Hand originated in the old country. Mob activity flourished during that era. A train of organized corruption ran from Cleveland to Canton to Steubenville. Cherry Street was the center of the Canton action, an avenue where racketeering joints and roving prostitutes vied for the same souls as St. Anthony's Catholic Church.

Mob slayings were a common occurrence in southeast Canton. Former members of the neighborhood still speak of people being blown up on porches, shot on street corners, or dropped in local rivers. Even today, well into their eighties, some of the locals talk of the Black Hand in muted terms and refuse permission to publish their names, for fear of reprisals.

This ethnic ghetto-where hookers tapped bordello windows to attract their johns; where shopkeepers lived across the street from female assassins; where parish priests tried to lead small-time hustlers to a better life; where the profane mingled with the sacred, and everyone struggled to make ends meet-this was the world that awaited Rita Rizzo's coming in 1923.

She was born in the sprawling home of Mary and Anthony Gianfrancesco, her maternal grandparents, who lived a block off the notorious Cherry Street. The house at 1029 Liberty was bordered on one side by an open field crawling with well-tended grapevines. Attached to the other side of the house, dominating the corner of Liberty and Eleventh streets, was Grandpa Gianfrancesco's saloon, a local watering hole and lunch spot for recently arrived immigrants and their American relations.

Rita's birth was a painful one for her mother, Mae. It took several hours and fifteen stitches to bring the nearly twelve-pound child into the world-facts Mae Gianfrancesco Rizzo never tired of repeating to her only daughter.

"My grandmother said I had rosy cheeks, a full head of hair, and was ready to go," Mother Angelica recalled with a cackle a lifetime later. "She said I looked like I was six months old."

John Rizzo, Rita's father, never wanted a child. When his wife of two years informed him she was pregnant, he "flew into a rage, violently ripping at her hair." Mae Rizzo believed this incident and the mental anguish that followed destroyed her milk supply.

When they first met, John seemed ideal to Mae. Tall, thin, dignified, he had a quiet demeanor and dressed impeccably. He wore spats and carried a cane. In a ghetto teeming with common laborers and hoodlums, John Rizzo was a dream come true. A tailor by trade, he was strolling down Eleventh Street when Mae's singing first drew him to the Gianfrancesco's kitchen door.

As Mae washed dishes, she would sing along to whatever Italian opera was spilling from her father's gramophone in the living room. Since her birth, music had always been there, as much a part of her life as Papa's saloon or the cast-iron stove in the kitchen. Mae wanted to be a singer, and she certainly had the looks for it. She was a striking woman, with dark eyes, sharp features, and an intense severity that attracted the glances of men in the neighborhood. Family photographs reveal a young woman who appreciated her good looks and knew which fashions would compliment them. Oversized hats, billowing dresses, gloves, and parasols adorned Mae's comely frame. Her beauty captivated John.

Yet for all her charms, Mae, even as a young woman, was convinced she had been cheated by life. She traced her troubles back to the fifth grade, when, during a fire drill, a male classmate took her by the hand. Whether Mae was resisting his advances or just in a foul mood, she pulled a plank from a nearby picket fence and cracked the boy over the head with it. Presumably, the teachers complained. Her mother, never one for conflict, decided that Mae had had enough education. She was removed from school and did not return. Later in life, the feeling that she didn't know enough or wasn't smart enough would leave deep scars on Mae Gianfrancesco-scars that would eventually burden her daughter.

When John Rizzo sauntered up to the kitchen door and complimented her voice, Mae must have thought him an answer to prayer. Here was a chance to escape the crowded, tempestuous household of brothers. A chance to start anew and maybe get an education. At twenty-two, Mae seized her chance at happiness and married John Rizzo on September 8, 1919, over the objections of her parents, who "never liked him."

Four years later, on September 19, 1923, the couple conveyed their five-month-old daughter, Rita Rizzo, to the font of St. Anthony's Church on Liberty Street. It was an established custom at the time to baptize infants within days of their birth, but a pair of tardy godparents had necessitated a delay. So when the Rizzos finally approached the font with the hefty child, who seemed much older than five months, the astonished priest turned to Mae. "Why didn't you wait till she could walk here?" he asked.

Copyright © 2005 by Raymond Arroyo.

About the Author

Raymond Arroyo, author of the New York Times bestseller Mother Angelica, is the news director and lead anchor of EWTNews. As creator and host of the news magazine The World Over Live, he is seen in more than 100 million households each week. He has worked at the Associated Press and the New York Observer, and for the political columnist team of Evans and Novak. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He lives in northern Virginia with his wife and three children.