Mother Angelica: Queen of Catholic Pirate Radio

Mother Mary Angelica founded the EWTN television network, and, more significantly for my purposes here, WEWN, a global shortwave broadcast service with transmitters located in Irondale, Alabama.  In the 1990's, Mother Angelica became one of the most dominant Christian voices on the shortwave bands, and WEWN a torch that beamed her message of the truth of believing and faithful Catholicism across the nation and the world.  She was a major influence concerning my conversion to the Catholic Faith in 2002, and it is truthful to say that my formation as a Catholic took place with her over many nights of listening to the most powerful voice on 41 meters.  She gets much credit for her pioneering work in Catholic television, while her savvy for international shortwave broadcasting goes largely unheralded and is just as significant.  It made her a worldwide voice for the faith rather than just an American phenomenon, and paved the way for the globalization of EWTN.

Mother Angelica earned the title of Queen of Catholic Pirate Radio when she publicly took on and disputed the apostate Archbishop of Los Angeles, Roger Cardinal Mahony, concerning the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.  While Mahony was unleashing his wrath upon Mother all the way to Rome, it should also be noted that he retreated quickly and issued a statement taking offense at her for daring to question his belief in the Real Presence.  Thanks to Mother's widespread and profound media influence, I'm sure a lot of bishops, cut from the same cloth as Mahoney, also thought twice about peddling the "Spirit of Vatican II" nonsense in an overt way that might end up on TV.         

Here's some vintage 'Mother A' for you: 

I’m so tired of you liberal Church in America! And everything you’ve ever done has gone in silence. Nothing, nothing you’ve done – from your witchcraft to your enneagrams to your centering prayer to all this ‘earth spirituality’ to replacing holy water with sand to destroying our churches and closing churches that are viable and ready to go…no, this is not an accident. We’ve swallowed this now for thirty years. I’m tired of it. We have swallowed enough of your idea of God! You have, really, no God, no dogma, no doctrine, and no authority, because the only authority in the Catholic Church is our Holy Father and the Magisterium, and you have disclaimed that. You don’t believe in the Eucharist, you don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception, you don’t believe in the Virgin Birth, you don’t believe in Mary’s power of intercession, you don’t believe in religious life, you don’t believe in being a spouse of Christ! You do believe in teaching to little children in the third grade sex education, you do believe in forcing centering prayer and forcing inclusive language upon us, and now you depict Jesus as a woman?!  You’re sick!

Nothing to add to that.  As a layman, my duty as a Catholic is to point out these things just as it was Mother's duty as a religious - a Carmelite nun.  She taught me well.  It's time for Catholic Pirate Radio, the next generation.

Father Charles Coughlin: Father of Pirate Radio

In 1926, Father Charles Coughlin first took to the airwaves on WJR radio in Detroit to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, which had recently burned crosses on the grounds of his parish.  Turning to politics in 1929, Father Coughlin quickly became a dominant and highly influential radio voice on the CBS network, with a weekly listening audience estimated at 30,000,000 during the peak of his popularity in the early 1930's.  While at first a fervent supporter of the policies and person of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his views became more controversial and his rhetoric more strident as the Great Depression lingered on.  By 1936, he was expressing a viewpoint that was anti-capitalist and anti-socialist, and invoked no little controversy by expressing a certain sympathy concerning the fascism of Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler.  He was accused of antisemitism based upon this and his searing critique of the European Jewish banking establishment, which he sought to qualify as follows: 

My purpose is to help eradicate from the world its mania for persecution, to help align all good men, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, Christian and non-Christian, in a battle to stamp out the ferocity, the barbarism and the hate of this bloody era. I want the good Jews with me, and I'm called a Jew baiter, an anti-Semite.

My point here is not to speak out for or against Father Coughlin and his political opinions, but merely to point to him as an early example of the efforts to censor and silence unpopular viewpoints.  He remains the textbook example of church and state teaming up to remove from public influence someone deemed too controversial to have his views heard by the great unwashed masses of the general public.  The Roosevelt Administration determined a priori that the First Amendment did not apply to radio broadcasting, and new regulations and restrictions were created specifically to remove Father Coughlin from the airwaves.  For the first time, public broadcasters had to obtain a permit and seek approval to speak on the air, and this was the impetus for those who refused to do so taking to the airwaves in protest: the birth of pirate radio.  While Father Coughlin was able to circumvent his banishment from network broadcasting by buying airtime on local stations, his reach and influence were drastically reduced.  In 1942 he was ordered to remove himself from public life by Bishop Edward Aloysius Mooney.  He complied without complaint and spent the remainder of his career as parish priest at the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.  He retired from active ministry in 1966.