NEWS FEATURE: Thousands Flock to New Shrine Where Mother Angelica Lives

c. 2000 Religion News Service HANCEVILLE, Ala. _ A snow-white picket fence lines both sides of the two-lane country road that winds through pastureland just a few miles from this quiet town in Cullman County. Horses graze along the route, which is dotted with “For Sale” signs and a few new houses, some with statues […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

HANCEVILLE, Ala. _ A snow-white picket fence lines both sides of the two-lane country road that winds through pastureland just a few miles from this quiet town in Cullman County.

Horses graze along the route, which is dotted with “For Sale” signs and a few new houses, some with statues of Mary or St. Francis of Assisi in the yards. The road gradually inclines as it approaches its destination _ the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery created by the controversial television nun Mother Angelica.


As first-time visitors top the hill at the end of the road, they often gasp at what is truly a sight _ and site _ to behold in the valley below.

Suddenly, in the midst of rural, predominantly Baptist Alabama, appears a Roman Catholic shrine and monastery sitting, it might be said, immaculately amid 380 acres between rolling hills. The edifice of 13th century Gothic design appears like a mirage to the thousands of visitors who flock each month to the shrine.

Inside the mammoth shrine _ which Mother Angelica calls a temple, because the Bible refers to the house of God as a temple _ is an altar covered in gold leaf that gives off warm hues when the candles are lit. The green-and-white Italian marble floors reflect stained-glass windows from Germany that depict scenes from the Bible. The wooden pews, altar and other appointments in the shrine are from Spain.

The temple sits a few hundred feet from the parking lot. It was designed that way to give visitors a feeling of traveling a long way _ like the journey of life. A statue of Jesus as a child, holding a heart symbolizing his own heart which he offers to everyone, stands in the middle of the courtyard. At the base of the statue is a biblical verse _ Isaiah 11:6 (RSV) _ reading, “And a little child shall lead them.” The verse is written on the four sides of the statue in English, Spanish, Italian and German in honor of the languages of groups that helped build the shrine.

In a nearby field is a barn, where six Knights (lay brothers) of the Holy Eucharist live in an upstairs apartment, and a giant satellite dish, the only hint of the 21st century in this rural scene.

The complex is the home of Mother Angelica, the affable but often controversial and hyperbolic television nun who founded the Eternal Word Television Network, and the Poor Clare Nuns of Perpetual Adoration, a traditionalist Franciscan order, as well as the Knights of the Holy Eucharist.

“We have about 10 or 12 groups a week come here, and about half of these are Protestant,” said Julia Tucker, director of pilgrimage at the shrine, which took nearly four years to build.


The shrine, which opened to the public last December, is open for daily prayers from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Funds donated by five out-of-state families _ all whom wished to remain anonymous _ paid for the structure.

Mother Angelica, 77, is internationally known for the Eternal Word Television Network she founded in Irondale, a Birmingham suburb, nearly two decades ago. An ardent doctrinal traditionalist, she has had run-ins with a number of members of the church’s hierarchy, including Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, whom she accused on her television program, “Mother Angelica Live,” of heresy in the wake of a 1998 pastoral letter on the Eucharist issued by Mahony. Mahony has complained to the Vatican and sought changes in the management and tone of the EWTN.

Although she lives at the monastery with 32 other cloistered nuns, she has special permission from the Vatican to broadcast her television program, which originates in Birmingham, each Tuesday and Wednesday.

She decided to build the shrine six years ago, officials said, after traveling to Bogota, Colombia, where a priest invited her to visit a local church.

In a story retold by Brother Angelo, one of the Knights living at the complex, during Mother Angelica’s visit to the church a statue of Jesus as a child with arms stretched upward “came alive” and told her to “build me a temple where you live and I will help those who help you.”


She returned home determined to do the statue’s bidding and saw her dream come true when the shrine was consecrated last December.

DEA END BETOWT

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