Katrina Helps Teach Nun's Lesson of Faith

Sept. 5, 2005 -- -- It is hard for those who haven't been through disaster to understand the reassembling nature of it -- how it snatches the components of one's life and, nearly instantly, repositions them in ways one could really never have predicted.

"I was just looking to live in my beautiful New Orleans," said Raymond Arroyo, "have a daiquiri, and enjoy my Mass on Sunday." Arroyo is the news director for the international Catholic network EWTN; he worked in Birmingham, Ala., but lived in New Orleans -- until Aug. 28.

Arroyo had been at work, at EWTN headquarters in Birmingham, watching the array of news feeds as Katrina approached Lousiana. Looking up, he saw an image that chilled him: the radar picture of Katrina. He remembered very similar images, well-known in hurricane lore. "This looked like Betsy and Camille." And it meant nothing good.

"I called my wife," and he told her to start packing. He rushed to New Orleans, and he, his family, his parents and his grandparents threw what they could fit into their vehicles and began driving from the city. Arroyo started calling hotels. Mississippi: no room. Georgia: no room. Alabama: no room. For a Catholic, well-schooled in the story of Jesus' birth, it had an all-too familiar ring. He started praying.

And then he called EWTN, and appealed to the woman who had created that network, who had been his mentor, whose biography Arroyo had just completed -- a cloistered nun named Mother Angelica.

"Mother Angelica, she saved me, she saved my life, my family's life," he said. Saved them, Arroyo explained, because she told them to move into a guest house at EWTN's headquarters in Birmingham.

But he also praised Mother Angelica because the things she had taught him, or tried to teach him over the years, no longer seemed just philosophical musings. They were immediately, and startlingly, practical.

"The crucial thing she taught me was to live in the present moment, and Mother did, and I'm learning in these trying days," he said. Mother Angelica, before a series of strokes disabled her, was one of the most influential women in modern Catholicism. Her network, begun in a convent garage, is now the largest religious broadcast network in the world. She fought bankers, builders and bishops --