Birmingham Al Tv Stations

Last fall and early winter I had occasion to travel through the upper Midwest and South on business. A couple of side trips continue to play in my imagination, antiphonally. On a barely sunny, cold Sunday morning in November, I drove from Minneapolis to Collegeville for Mass at Saint John's. I especially wanted to see the Marcel Breuer church, which was startling in its monumentality. After Mass, I spent the better part of a couple of hours walking around the campus and along the lakeside next to the monastery. I found the community cemetery on a hill; the monks are all memorialized with identically carved granite crosses that seemed ready to withstand both the impending winter and the ages. I walked up and down the aisles between the monks' crosses until I found the grave of Virgil Michel - the visionary American Benedictine who pioneered the midcentury liturgical renewal movement. I stood for a few minutes, said a prayer, and then drove back to Minneapolis.

In February, in a significantly different climate, I was in Birmingham, Alabama, near Irondale, Mother Angelica's base of operations. Explaining one's taste for the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) is tricky; not exactly entertainment and not quite camp, there is a kitsch quality that's oddly compelling when not completely infuriating. During a recent broadcast, for example, Mother handles an obviously distraught caller afraid she hadn't been forgiven because her confessor had not required an Act of Contrition, by insisting, "What formula did he use?...It might not have been valid." When our local cable company removed EWTN from its roster a couple of years ago, it was replaced with the SciFi Channel. One friend from another city asked how we could tell the difference.

I can only catch EWTN in hotel rooms now. So, when I was in the neighborhood, shortly after reports that Mother Angelica had been cured of the effects of an injury that had hampered her mobility for years, I wanted to see the place for myself. Allegedly healed through the mediation of a foreign woman with close ties to Our Lady, Mother's timing was nothing if not opportune. Surely, for those with eyes to see (especially in Rome and weasely American chanceries), heaven was signaling its interests in the Poor Clare network executive's contretemps with Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles. For those who have forgotten, last year Mother Angelica accused Mahony of teaching heresy about the nature of the Real Presence (see, "Liturgical Confusion," Commonweal, January 30, 1998).

Visiting Mother's sacred precincts is something like taking the Universal Studios Tour in Hollywood or Orlando. Once past the guard in a glass booth, who lifted the traffic barrier without question or interest (raising doubts about security in the same instant that one wondered why there was security), there is ample parking down a small hill. The church, TV studio, nuns' monastery and another for the male minions, are laid out in a bowl-like area along the hillside. Cloistered gardens appear to extend beyond the back of the buildings. Quarters are close but not congested. The front hillside is dotted with shrines - groups of statues that, even on a weekday afternoon, had a number of kneeling pilgrims in attendance. A phalanx of young men with very important looking ID tags hanging around their necks bustled outside the TV studio.

The chapel and its appointments have been designed by a sensibility that is not intimidated by the ornate. It's like a gilt cage, with images only slightly less vivid than the Mormon diorama in Salt Lake City. The aesthetic is unambiguously religious, to be sure, but the effect is closer to Kundun than it is to The Song of Bernadette. Added to the mix are the cameras that broadcast the daily Mass (that, pace Mahony, is said in Latin and accompanied by nuns fully prostrate behind the grille but not beyond the cameras, which are mounted on the walls like a series of surreal, postmodern Stations of the Cross). I sat in the back for a few minutes, irrationally mindful of the cameras, wondering who was watching; hoping that God wasn't.

There were a number of worshipers in the chapel and a steady stream moving in and out. The choreography was as elaborate as the decor. I haven't seen such profound bows since the last time The Egyptian was shown on the American Movie Channel - I kept remembering the booming voice of Mekere the high priest, "Bow down...on your faces...bow down to Pharaoh." To say the least, the spirit of Virgil Michel, with its clear-eyed traditionalism and emphasis on corporate lay participation in the liturgy, seemed even farther away in time and space than did Minnesota.

Taken as a whole, the Mother Angelica phenomenon is more mystifying than entertaining. It's not the bad art or the practiced conservatism that's disturbing. It's the insularity (hence the gatekeeper) and the self-righteous impermeability, which is both smug and judgmental (hence the casual charges of heresy and the "It might not have been valid" alarums).

As I pulled away from the gates, I again thought of Virgil Michel. I imagined that he would be spinning in his grave at the return of this essentially anachronistic liturgical piety passing itself off as the authentic tradition. But, then, as long as Michel was prone, I'm not sure anyone in Irondale would notice.

J.V. Long's most recent article for Commonweal was "Clerical Character(s)," May 8, 1998. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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