Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises
Angelica, Mother M. & Allison, Christine
T his is a tough time to be spreading 1 the Word of God on television. But if you're in the racket, it helps to be a cloistered nun. Take Mother Angelica, founder of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery...
...One hopes to worship God with a little art if one has any," Igor Stravinsky once said...
...When she says that "I was in our darkroom developing some negatives for a layout when the Lord decided to clarify the nature of salvation for me," the appropriate response is not to gnash one's teeth in an anticlerical frenzy but to smile...
...In fact, interesting isn't the word...
...I believe it's far better to simply accept the fact that you're eating beans, and thank God for what you've got...
...There are no coy suggestions about the right amount of eyeshadow to use if you want to keep your man satisfied, no simian jabber about the evils of Ulysses and Lolita and any book that has the word "goddamn" in it...
...Before making her debut on "Mother Angelica Live," Mother Angelica was already publishing her homilies in the form of spiritual booklets, more than 15 million of which are currently in circulation...
...If it weren't, this book would be even more unnerving...
...Obviously when you talk about such things as God, religion, the church, man's soul, to a great many different people, you must necessarily do so in a great many different ways and on a great many different levels...
...Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it...
...So they do, or so I hope, but I have my doubts about the highway of The Whistling Priest: that is, I wouldn't think it led much of anywhere...
...G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered...
...Most of the fare in this book, in fact, is solid Catholic boilerplate...
...This book is an absolutely fascinating document of the way some people live now—and of the kind of religious advice they're getting from folks like Mother Angelica...
...But having been raised a Southern Baptist, I heard in my adolescence enough of the straight-from-theshoulder religious vulgarity with which this book is infested to last an eternal lifetime...
...It begins with the dust jacket, which quotes People as having called Mother Angelica "a combination of Ted Turner and Mother Theresa [sic...
...Beans are beans, my friend, and they don't taste like chicken...
...N of that the advice is necessarily bad...
...It's just that my stomach doesn't know it' ") to the equalizing cant of the guitar-strumming ninny ("Just because we live in suburbia or drink diet colas or worry about the Joneses doesn't mean we can't be saints...
...But when she ends a chapter with "Hang in there...
...Well, next to none...
...The guy at People who wrote that sentence or the gal at Harper & Row who thought it appropriate to slap on the jacket of Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises...
...Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises, as it turns out, is several notches above the typical...
...And Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises hits every cliche of the genre, from the gutsy nuns-can-be-funny-too comeback ("Lady,' I said, 'I do have faith...
...I only mean to suggest that every age gets the preaching it deserves, that our own shabby debased age probably rates preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart and Robert Schuller...
...But none of those levels can be—or at least none of them should be—in any sense flashy or false or vulgar, because if they are—no matter what the apparent justification—you run the very serious risk of making God, religion, the church, and man's soul seem a little bit of the same...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 51...
...While reading Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises, I came across one of the very few occasions on which Mother Angelica troubles to quote somebody: "Bishop Sheen once said that the truth is the truth whether everyone believes it or no one believes it...
...Right is right, even if nobody does it...
...Beats me, but the quote, either way, is suitable to the book...
...That whiff of Sheen is suggestive...
...Apologists like MOTHER ANGELICA'S ANSWERS, NOT PROMISES Mother M. Angelica with Christine Allison/Harper & Row/$13.95 Terry Teachout 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 Chesterton, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ronald Knox, C. S. Lewis, or Frank Sheed had it in abundance, and it didn't desert them just because they were talking to the widest possible audience...
...There are even some admirably blunt, if slightly dated, remarks on pop Protestantism: Spiritual pride is as old as the hills, but there is also a modern-day pride, a pride that manifests itself under the giant umbrella of "positive thinking," and we should confront it...
...Who was tackier...
...it is impossible for anyone stuffed to bursting with the palsy faith of the present moment to do anything but swoon with nausea...
...But books like Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises are not meant to be reviewed...
...Typical, of course, that Mother Angelica should have cited her great-grandfather of the television screen...
...Some of Mother Angelica's offensiveness is, of course, nothing morethan the naivete of a cloistered nun...
...Her sincerity has even stood up to a "60 Minutes" profile...
...When you subscribe to "positive thinking" you put all of your chips on how you want to feel today...
...Mother Angelica does offer a short but hair-raising riff on how Clark Gable's lonely "damn" in Gone With the Wind led directly to everything bad about movies and radio and television today...
...Take Mother Angelica, founder of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and of the Eternal Word Television Network...
...likely to be skimming off the odd million here and there, much less groping her godly colleagues in steambaths...
...I hope that thousands of lost souls find themselves in the pages of this book...
...One need only glance at Mother Angelica's remarks about homosexuality ("No matter how deep-seated your homosexuality may be, it is not a license to engage in homosexual activity") to realize that she isn't trimming her cloth to fit the wimple of contemporary theological flabbiness...
...And they were right...
...For if that remark has a familiar odor, it's because somebody else said it—better...
...And, on its better days, Mother Angelica...
...Don't get me wrong...
...This poses an interesting category problem...
...I've always disliked and mistrusted this carnival shill approach to the Church...
...I only read this one because kind friends at The American Spectator thought I might find it interesting as a cultural artifact...
...The point of which is that there are other roads left to the Christian apologist besides the asphalt trail of prosy vulgarity...
...Even more typical that someone, whether quoter or quotee, got it wrong...
...The last word on this style of apologetic was probably spoken by Edwin O'Connor, who offered in his novel The Edge of Sadness the following Bishop Sheen-inspired monologue apropos an imaginary TV personality called The Whistling Priest: All roads lead to Rome...
...Having sworn a vow of poverty, Mother Angelica is one electronic preacher who isn't Terry Teachout is a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News...
...Mother Angelica is neither flashy nor false, and her sincerity is manifest...
...God loves you...
...So it was a foregone conclusion that she would get around to writing a full-length book...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
