One Miserable Life : Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 2)

Freshly baptized, Rita was carried by her mother to a side altar dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows. Surely Mae felt an affinity for this particular image of Mary. On the altar of the Madonna, whose exposed heart bore swords of anguish, Mae placed her only child. "She told me that she said, 'I give you my daughter,' " Mother Angelica remembered a bit sadly. "I'm sure she thought she would have other children, but she never did."

It is no wonder. The Rizzo marriage was already crumbling. John's inability to support the family financially seemed to be a contributing factor.

"My father could never make a decent living," Mother Angelica insisted. "Finally, my mother got him to rent a house. . . . One night I was in my crib. And I started crying, yelling, and screaming. So she got out of bed to check on me, and there were roaches everywhere, all over me, all over the wall. The wallpaper was moving. It was just full of roaches." After some choice words to John, no doubt deriding his failings as a provider, Mae bundled Rita up and went to her parents' home for the night. This would become a regular pattern throughout their marriage.

The relationship was further undermined by John Rizzo's overbearing mother, Catherine. Around 1926, Catherine Rizzo could find no domicile, despite the fact that she had eleven children, including John. So it was decided she would join the young Rizzo family in Canton-at Mae's urging.

"She didn't have enough foresight to figure out that if eleven children didn't want their mother there must be something wrong," Mother Angelica said sardonically. "So [my mother] took her in and that's when the trouble started."

In fact, the trouble probably started much earlier. John had been physically and verbally abusing Mae for years, according to court documents. So while it's unlikely that Catherine Rizzo destroyed the marriage, she certainly created flash points for the couple to war over.

The determined Mae met her equal in Grandma Rizzo. A big woman, with a mouth to match. She suffered no fools-especially in the kitchen. Grandma Rizzo's gastronomic standards were high, and Mae's cooking, as well as everything else the woman did, was just not up to par, and certainly not good enough for her son. The regular criticism became too much for an insecure person like Mae to bear.

One afternoon, Mae had just popped a chicken into the oven, bone and all-a pet peeve for Grandma Rizzo, who proudly deboned her fowl in minutes. Before the oven door had closed, the old lady began chastising Mae for her culinary short comings. Three-year-old Rita clung to her mother's side. After listening intently for several minutes, the child stepped between her mother and Grandma Rizzo.

"I said to my grandmother, 'Oh shut up. You all time talk, talk, talk.' Well, my mother grabbed me up and gave me a hundred kisses because I was defending her," Angelica recalled. "My father would never defend her!"

This would be the first, although not the last, time Rita would raise her voice in almost visceral defense of her mother. It is also the first glimpse of the outspoken quality that would come to define her character. But the intervention did little to quell the acrimony between Mae and her mother-in-law.

Sometime between 1927 and 1928, according to Mother Angelica, a possessed Mae climbed the stairs of their home in search of a gun to kill the old woman. "If my father's mother had been there, she would have done it. Luckily, she had left for Reading, Pennsylvania, to live with her daughter . . ."

By November of 1928, John Rizzo was also living elsewhere. For two years, he lost himself in California, providing no explanation and no forwarding address. Without money or a job, Mae had to support what was left of her family. Like refugees, she and five-year-old Rita returned to her parents' home though. They were not exactly welcome there. The Gianfrancesco home was already filled to capacity. Mae's four brothers (Tony, Pete, Frank, and Nick) and the elder Gianfrancescos occupied the two bedrooms, forcing Rita and Mae to sleep in a renovated attic. Over the years, Mother Angelica often told a story about that first winter in the house. As she and her mother slept in the upper room, a storm blew open the windows, depositing snow on top of them. Given the resources and generosity of the Gianfrancescos during this period, it seems odd that they would subject their own daughter and grandchild to such brutal conditions.

Anthony Gianfrancesco was far from poor, despite the poverty around him. He owned three homes in the neighborhood, which he rented to family and to Canton's newly arrived Italian immigrants at cut-rate prices. Anthony had emigrated from Naples, Italy, to Colorado, where he worked in a gold mine, before moving to Akron, Ohio. There he met and married Mary Votolato. Conflicts with his mother-in-law spurred a resettling in Canton and a new business venture.

The saloon bearing Anthony Gianfrancesco's name became a safe harbor for foreign families afloat in a strange new land. In southeast Canton, the saloon was the center of Italian public life, a place where countrymen could speak their native tongue, mingle with their own, and share the indignities endured that day at the hands of the Americans. Mother Angelica remembered her grandfather providing Italian newcomers with clothes and helping them find work. Grandma Gianfrancesco would often feed the immigrant families in a room above the saloon, where the Italian lodges would sometimes meet. It was a family place. Inebriation was forbidden, and if the tab got too high or the hour too late, the Gianfrancescos would send their customers home.

It is likely that hard liquor or beer was served in the Gianfrancesco establishment during Prohibition, which hit Canton on January 16, 1920, and would not be repealed until February 1933. Mother Angelica vividly recalled one event that happened in either 1929 or 1930.

"I couldn't have been more than four or five, and my grandfather didn't want me in the saloon. He gave me a small mug of beer with a big collar on it. I had four or five pretzels, and he said, 'Go outside and sit on the curb and enjoy yourself.' So I'm out there on the curb drinking this beer and eating pretzels when the Salvation Army Band shows up. Well, they're praying all kinds of psalms in front of me and praying for my salvation. They must have been shocked to see this kid drinking beer. I remember yelling up to my grandfather, 'There's a big band down here.' "

The little girl with the Buster Brown haircut had a front-row seat on life unvarnished. At the corner of Liberty and Eleventh streets, she observed the people and the ways of the world, not all of them as benign as the passing Salvation Army Band. On her curbside outings, she would converse with prostitutes, members of the mob, men returning from the mills, Mamooch-an Italian woman who roamed the streets, praying-and the black people who shared her neighborhood. This moving carousel of humanity would instill within the child an empathy for strangers and teach her to relate easily with individuals from disparate backgrounds. In this laboratory of life, young Rita absorbed the misery of the world and the hidden humor few ever managed to find.

About this time, Mae Rizzo set up a dry-cleaning shop next to her father's saloon, after a brief apprenticeship with a tailor and cleaner. It would be the first of many entrepreneurial efforts she undertook to provide for Rita without family assistance. If she had to live beneath her parents' roof, Mae was determined to show them she could support her daughter-alone.

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.