Rita Rizzo, a poor girl, sickly but feisty, left home in Canton, Ohio, at age 21 to join a contemplative order of nuns in Cleveland. One thing led to another and Mother Angelica of the Annunciation, as she was now named, found herself in Irondale, Ala. There on the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1981, the 37th anniversary of her formal invitation to enter religious life, she launched EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network), which has grown to become the largest religious media network in the world.

She hosted a show and set the tone for the whole operation. It was spiritual but spirited — a refreshing combination. When a priest from the conference of U.S. bishops tried to muscle in on her budding enterprise, she pushed back. He reminded her that she wouldn’t be around forever. “I’ll blow the damn thing up before you get your hands on it,” she snapped. On air in the late 1990s, she tore into Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles for a pastoral letter in which he neutered, in her view, Catholic teaching on the eucharist.

After suffering two strokes in late 2001, Mother Angelica largely retired from the airwaves. Some observers say that since then it has lost its edge. My impression from listening to EWTN Radio is that politesse prevails there these days. In recent years the archbishop of New York has been in the news too often for making ambiguous statements about sexual morality, and I imagined what Mother Angelica would have said, but no one I heard on her network ever said it. Likewise with respect to controversial statements by the current bishop of Rome.

Someday Catholics may get another network, WWMAS (What Would Mother Angelica Say). Her colleagues who carry the EWTN torch in her absence know her mind better than I do, however, and no doubt they would say that they try to preserve her vision and commitment to the truth. Neither eloquent nor learned, Mother Angelica was nonetheless intelligent and charming, plainly comfortable in her own skin. She was strong-willed but not proud. No TV personality was ever less pretentious. She died yesterday, Easter Sunday, at age 92. Requiescat in pace.