When you have a blog, you get to see how people get to your website, including any Google searches that bring them to your site.
I noticed someone found my website doing a Google search "Mother Angelica Changes Habits." Maybe they were watching the 25th anniversary special on EWTN (Happy Anniversary EWTN - I watch over the Internet sometimes) and saw pictures from the eighties when she and her sisters wore a modified habit. She and her sisters wear very traditional habits now. Click the "click to continue reading..." link below to get the story of why her community went back to wearing traditional habits. I got this information from Raymond Arroyo's book about her, Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles.
When she entered religious life on August 15, 1944, she of course wore a traditional habit. It's a long story, but in 1961, she and a small group of her sisters from Ohio moved to Alabama with the intention of setting up a monastary for African-American women. God had different plans, it seems! In the early sixites, after Vatican II, her community gradually modified the habit to try to appeal to young aspirants, hence the beige and tan ensemble you see her wearing in the early days of EWTN.
Arroyo tells of several accounts of Mother Angelica having clashes with the Bishops over this or that, and over time she became disgusted with the liberal Catholics in America. She got absolutely fed up on World Youth Day in 1993, when the organizers staged a "Stations of the Cross" in Mile-high stadium, with a woman cast as Jesus.
"If a woman could play Jesus before millions at an official Papal event, why should women be denied the right to stand in persona Christi at the altar (Arroyo, p. 242)?
She decided then and there to return to traditional religious life. Arroyo quotes her as saying on her live show.
"You see this collar. We had this little modern collar so that we could appoeal to this modern world, this pagan society...We're going to change it. We're going to look very Roman because I'm making a statement!" (p. 241).
By Christmas of 1993, she and her sisters were back in the traditional habit. Some of them were thrilled, others had a hard time adjusting. So there you have it. And her order, and others that wear traditional habits are flourishing.
BTW - Curt Jester has a good review of Arroyo's book here.
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