Night, Mother

Mother Angelica, who brought the world the ecclesiastical ramblings of a frumpy old biddy sitting in what looked like a hospital chapel, has died of complications of a stroke at the age of 92. The Franciscan nun started making appearances on a Chicago station in 1977, then quit the station when it refused to censor a movie she found objectionable. Turning the other cheek, she took $200, built a studio in her monastery’s garage and founded the Eternal Word Television Network, the largest Roman Catholic television network in the country, where she bitched constantly about liberalizing trends in the Catholic Church like a holier-than-thou Andy Rooney. Time dubbed her the most influential Roman Catholic woman in America, which by church standards still put her behind an altar boy from Topeka, Kansas. By the time she found out that she had backed the wrong horse in 2001 when God had had enough and silenced her through a series of strokes that also made her look like a pirate, her low-rent half hour of nonsense “Mother Angelica Live” was the anchor of a 24-hour Catholic programming network reaching more than 100 million homes in the United States, South America, Africa and Europe.