The EWTN network - forever Trump?
Catholic media
Mother Angelica, who spearheaded the founding of EWTN, died aged 92 in 2016
Photo: CNS
The powerful US Catholic media network founded 40 years ago by Mother Angelica became an uncritical champion of Donald Trump. With Trump no longer in the White House, and with his support amongst Catholics wavering, EWTN faces some difficult choices about its future direction
It is the largest religious media organisation in the world. The
Eternal Word Television Network, known as EWTN, was founded by Mother
Angelica, a charismatic Poor Clare nun, in 1981. She established what is
now a Catholic media conglomerate from scratch, with its headquarters
in the unlikely setting of Birmingham, Alabama, the heart of the
evangelical bible belt of the United States. “Remember to keep us
between your gas and electric bill,” was how she would sign off her
show.
Today, EWTN reaches 310 million television households in more
than 145 countries across the world, and according to the latest filed
accounts reported an annual income of $64,646,744. Along with a TV
station, the conglomerate has more than 500 radio affiliates, a
book-publishing unit, and the Catholic News Agency, based in Denver,
Colorado. In 2011 it acquired the National Catholic Register, a
newspaper and website, from the Legionaries of Christ.
Some
worry that EWTN has drifted too far from its original ideal of
faithfully witnessing to Catholic teaching across its media platforms.
In recent years, EWTN has become increasingly partisan in its politics.
It has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, combining this
with hostility to the pontificate of Pope Francis. As I wrote in my book
The Outsider, the network is “Fox News under Catholic cover”. Others
have renamed it the “Eternally With Trump Network”.
EWTN represents – and speaks to – a sizeable number of ordinary
Catholics in the US, half of whom supported Trump in the 2020 election.
Many inside the network – which includes many able, hard-working media
professionals – watched the scenes from Capitol Hill on 6 January in
horror. It provokes a question: Have they been representing Catholic
support for Trump, or had they fuelled his rise? It appears that there
is pressure on EWTN to stop flying the Maga (Make America Great Again)
flag. Before the election, Michael Warsaw, the network’s chairman and
chief executive, wrote approvingly about the vision he associated with
Trump’s America which, he said, “believes in equality of opportunity,
opposes violent riots, and stands against the revisionist historians”.
The sight of a pro-Trump mob storming the heart of American democracy
and assaulting police officers has provoked second thoughts in some of
the ex-president’s supporters.
The early signals suggest,
however, that the network’s leadership is preparing to double down in
its support for Trumpism. At the end of 2020, there was a spate of
high-profile departures from the network, widely seen as a “purge” of
more moderate conservative voices. Among them was Gloria Purvis, a
pro-life Black radio host who spoke out against racism following the
George Floyd murder last summer. No reason was given for her sudden
dismissal. Also gone is Fr Larry Richards, who hosted a popular radio
show, and spoke favourably about the Pope on his programme. Two senior
and experienced figures at the Catholic News Agency, the
editor-in-chief, J. D. Flynn, and Washington bureau chief Ed Condon,
both moderate conservatives, left on New Year’s Eve: they have since
established their own media project, The Pillar.
As news of the firings and departures emerged, an EWTN show host, Fr
Mitch Pacwa SJ, turned up as a guest on the YouTube show of the
right-wing internet personality Timothy Gordon. Gordon has publicly
supported Proud Boys, a far-right organisation.
“The politics of
an EWTN listener or viewer is inconsistent with the politics of Pope
Francis,” one Church media source told me. “The politics is the driver
here and not faith. Francis has signalled he wants engagement, and [the
network] is sticking with confrontation.” Joe Biden is a practising
Catholic who quotes the Bible and papal encyclicals in his speeches, and
carries the rosary beads of his late son Beau in his pocket.
Nevertheless, expect EWTN and its associated outlets to be among those
most critical of the new president. They are not the only ones: the
leadership of the United States’ bishops’ conference has already
established a working group to address Biden’s policy on abortion.
Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, President of the US Bishops’
Conference, sits on EWTN’s board.
Much of the support for Trump
was driven by his anti-abortion stance. EWTN and others backed a
self-described “pro-life” president in spite of his enthusiastic support
for the death penalty and policies that led to the children of migrants
being forcibly separated from their parents. It felt transactional.
Plenty of pro-lifers now feel deeply uncomfortable about the deal,
particularly after the Capitol Hill riots. “Like so many of us,
including the overwhelmingly large number of pro-lifers I know, I was
disgusted and horrified,” Charles Camosy, a theologian and former
Democrats for Life board member, told the Catholic News Agency: “I’ve
been warning against this relationship [with Trump] from the very
beginning.”
The problem, critics say, is that EWTN has reduced the Catholic faith
to a narrow and rigid interpretation of its moral teachings. Take the
Pope’s recent book which sets out his vision for the post-Covid world,
Let Us Dream. Extraordinarily, aside from a single blog post, the book
was ignored by every EWTN outlet. “They don’t have television shows
about the preferential option for the poor, or about how Catholic
teaching critiques capitalism as well as communism,” Dawn Eden
Goldstein, the theologian and writer who has appeared on numerous EWTN
television and radio programmes, observed.
Then there is the
link between the Trump movement and the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose
followers were prominent amongst those who attacked the Capitol,
convinced that the 2020 election was “stolen” from the former president.
Enter Archbishop Carlo Mario Viganò, former papal ambassador to the US,
who has given credence to QAnon theories in his various interventions.
Viganò has often received favourable coverage from EWTN, and in 2018,
the National Catholic Register was one of the two outlets Viganò used to
publish his notorious “testimony”, calling on the Pope to resign. More
recently, Viganò has joined those talking about election “fraud”.
Goldstein
spoke to me from Washington DC ahead of the presidential inauguration.
She explained that guardsmen with automatic rifles and armoured vehicles
were patrolling within walking distance of her home. The security
lockdown was necessary after the events of 6 January. “EWTN needs to
repent of their role in lionising Viganò in the mainstream Catholic
media,” she told me. “They have gravely harmed their Catholic audiences
and are complicit in the violent polarisation which led to the riots.”
Perhaps
the most glaring example of EWTN’s pro-Trump, anti-Francis coverage is
found on The World Over, the weekly show hosted by Raymond Arroyo, the
network’s founding news director and lead anchor and Mother Angelica’s
official biographer. Arroyo is also a regular guest and occasional
substitute host on The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham’s popular
pro-Trump Fox News talk show. “This all has a Les Misérables air about
it,” was how he described the Capitol Hill riots in a tweet, since
deleted.
Several sources have told me that Warsaw has been
challenged inside the Vatican about EWTN’s coverage, and in particular
about Arroyo’s abrasive show. Warsaw sits on the board of the Vatican’s
Dicastery for Communications. The papal ambassador to the US, Archbishop
Christoph Pierre, is one of those who has raised concerns. When I
interviewed Warsaw for The Outsider he told me it is “simply ludicrous”
to suggest EWTN is hostile to Pope Francis. “We are united with the Pope
in accompanying and leading people to understand the beauty, truth, and
goodness which is found in the Church,” he insisted. But Warsaw did not
deny he had been challenged by Archbishop Pierre and Vatican officials.
EWTN
has wealthy supporters, and although its donors are drawn to its
religious mission, political motivations cannot be discounted. A
powerful axis has formed behind the network. On the board is Frank Hanna
III, a donor to the Republican party whose wealth is estimated at
several hundred million dollars, and Tim Busch, a wealthy businessman
who in 2017 suggested the Trump era would be a “time of light” for the
US. Both Hanna and Busch combine their Catholic faith with the vigorous
promotion of laissez-faire free-market economics. Other EWTN donors
include the Knights of Columbus, the lay Catholic group whose leadership
has shown support for Trump; William Barr, Trump’s attorney general
until he resigned a few days before Christmas, once served on the
knights’ board.
Can EWTN credibly combine support for Trump and
Trump-ism with faithfulness to the Church’s witness in the long term? In
a 13 January essay, “Mea Maxima Culpa”, Mark Shea, a Catholic writer
and blogger who is close to conservative Catholic circles in the US,
apologised for “my part in creating the conservative Christian Maga
horror show that now rampages across our country, threatening life and
limb, spreading Pandemic, crying with self-pity, raging against the
Pope, the Church, its neighbours, and brandishing aloft the banner of
the unborn, Jesus, guns, hatred for gays, ‘the family’, and ‘religious
liberty’ while it lawlessly destroys both the US and the Church’s
witness.”
He concluded: “I believe Christians in the US are in
desperate need of metanoia – of turning around and, above all, of taking
full responsibility for our part in doing the ecclesial equivalent of
dipping the Eucharist in sewage and then being upset that normal people
are refusing to receive at it our filthy hands.”
A time of conversion and cleansing is sorely needed.
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