In Defense of EWTN

M y first contact with the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) came long before I became Catholic. Channel-surfing during a sleepover at a friend’s house when I was younger, my friend and I landed on Mother Angelica praying the Rosary. A mixture of boredom and intrigue led us to join along. I had the “Hail Mary” down pat after five repetitions. When I converted more than a decade later, I had Mother Angelica to thank for teaching me how to pray the Rosary.

It’s easy enough to forget that the largest religious-media network in the world was founded by a scrappy nun out of a garage in Alabama, because, well, scrappy truth-telling nuns don’t exactly make the cover of Vogue in today’s culture. But the network’s critics, then and now, continue to inadvertently remind us of the incredible impact the network has had and continues to have on the world.

It’s easy enough for the “courtiers” of Rome to throw mud at EWTN. When I mentioned the latest attack to a friend, she reminded me that long before the network had its modern critics, the likes of Fr. James Martin and now disgraced Cardinal Mahoney, among others, had made a sport of criticizing it and its foundress in particular.

But it’s impossible to imagine life as a Catholic in the 21st century without EWTN. For decades, the network has been beaming the Mass to the homebound, the Rosary to the downtrodden, and major church events to those who can’t afford the plane tickets to Rome. When I had to cancel my own plane ticket to a beatification in Spain because I was so pregnant I quite literally could not walk, I watched it on EWTN. One quick Internet search and boom, there it is: all two hours and 15 minutes of the ceremony, on EWTN’s YouTube channel.

EWTN has been bringing Catholics around the globe together through a shared screen long before the pandemic made this commonplace. Arguably no entity has done more to bring Catholicism into the 21st century than EWTN. And despite the criticism that the network has some kind of hang-up with Vatican II, no entity has done more to make the Church accessible to people through modern media. Perhaps even more noteworthy, however, is how the network answered one of the most pressing calls of our current pontiff: to elevate the voices of Catholic women in the Church.

One such voice is my friend Montserrat Alvarado, one of the many female anchors EWTN has hired. On a recent visit to the National Basilica in Washington, D.C., with my daughter, she told me she heard Montse’s voice. We rounded several corners, expecting to find her. And we did, sort of . . . on a TV inside the Basilica, running down the day’s news. My daughter was doubly awestruck: at seeing a Catholic news network, and at watching a woman she knew from our living room as its star. She asked me to take a photo in front of the screen.

I myself have been invited to join EWTN’s myriad programs more times than I can remember. I’ve grappled with topics ranging from the sex-abuse scandals to paid family leave to Catholic schools in a pandemic. None of these are easy topics. Call that a “dialogue with the devil” if you will. But if you really want to see the “work of the diablos” and “powerful U.S.-based media conglomerate[s]” using their “formidable wealth and power to turn a large portion of the people of God against Rome,” I’d suggest you look basically everywhere except EWTN.

The mainstream press delights in trashing the Church, in using the pope as a political prop, in tearing down faithful Catholics, in confusing the laity about doctrine, and in mocking, deriding, and insulting nearly everything the Church stands for. That kind of turning the people of God against Rome is easy to come by in today’s media world. What’s not is programming that offers those at the ends of the earth the chance to glimpse Rome, gives the busy an easy way to pray, offers those shut in a way to see Mass, and makes a Catholic girl proud of her faith and excited to see what Catholic women walking in the shoes of Mother Angelica can achieve for their Church.