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The Santa Fe New Mexican

By ANDREA SHAPIRO, IMAGES COURTESY EWTN

Johnny comes marching home

I had never met a nun until my final semester of college, when a sister enrolled in my printmaking course. She wore no winglike wimple and looked more like a wraith in brown wrapping paper than a rendering of the Virgin in a Northern Renaissance altarpiece.

One day I worked up the nerve to ask her a question that had been nagging me since I saw Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal my freshman year. She was polishing a lithography stone and I tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Why does the Book of Revelation say that when the lamb opened the seventh seal there was silence in heaven for about half an hour?" This mystery had been left unexplored in my confirmation class at Temple Beth El in Chappaqua, N.Y. "That was the silence of God," the nun replied. Then she returned to the stone. Perhaps she'd been warned about religion tourists like me and was instructed to dispense information to us on a need-to-know basis. It was then that I began to suspect the church might be like the Army.

In the three decades since that conversation, nuns -- or at least one nun in particular -- have grown less enigmatic about God's silence. Mother Angelica, a once-cloistered sister of the Poor Clare order, founded the Eternal Word Television Network in 1981 in a garage of the monastery she established in Irondale, Ala. In August, EWTN celebrated its 25th anniversary in the Word business. On its Web site, the abbess's cottage industry is described as "the largest religious media network in the world," reaching an estimated 105 million homes in 110 countries, transmitting 24 hours a day. Programming includes documentaries, talk shows, live coverage of events at the Vatican, and children's shows -- all circumscribed by the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. In plain terms, EWTN regards the Holy Spirit as its executive producer.

Televangelism has acquired a sordid if not laughable reputation, largely due to bad-seed preachers who have built personal fortunes with "seed faith" donations from less-than-fortunate believers. Though private bequests also sponsor EWTN, the network manages to glean that support without hawking miracle prayer cloths or airing footage of bouffant-coiffed pastors laying hands on the ailing until they swoon to the floor. EWTN's closest approximation of fundraising is the occasional QVC-style taped segment of the aging, portly Mother Angelica presenting books, medals, and sparkly rosaries. There's fire in her conviction but no whiff of brimstone in her pitch.

While a reported 80 percent of EWTN's programming is original, the network also airs independently produced shows, including Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's series Life Is Worth Living, which ran from 1952 to 1957. These archival broadcasts are a chance to witness an ecumenical thinker examining the prevailing secular ideologies of his time -- communism and Freudianism -- and dwarfing them through his advocacy of ethics and faith. Sheen was the first televangelist. He began his electric ministry in 1930 as a regular orator on radio, but in the early '50s the now-defunct DuMont network (once a competitor to network television's surviving big three) sought filler for its 8 p.m. slot on Tuesdays, then dominated by Milton Berle on NBC. The preacher was thus thrown a bone: a prime-time pulpit. DuMont didn't have high hopes for the parish.

The show amounted to an unscripted 28-minute monologue Sheen delivered while striking stiff poses, addressing the camera with his famously penetrating gaze, and intermittently drawing cryptic diagrams on a blackboard. His wardrobe consisted of a magenta cape, skullcap, and cummerbund; a black cassock trimmed with red; and a gold cross. The colors could only be imagined in the initial broadcasts because the program was first aired in black-and-white.

These were modest theatrics, but with them the bishop stirred both the choir and millions of others, including Protestants and Jews who might ordinarily have shunned a cathedral's pews. All things are possible, apparently: Sheen received the Emmy for television's most outstanding personality of 1952. Upon winning the award, he is said to have said, "I'd like to thank my writers -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John." But when he said it is unclear. According to a Los Angeles Times article published the day after the Emmys, Monsignor Anthony Browers claimed Sheen's award and thanked the Academy on his behalf. It seems the bishop wasn't at the ceremony.

If the thanking-my-writers story is apocryphal, one could argue that faith-inspired television would be poorer without its likes. The tale is often invoked by EWTN clerics, including the Rev. John Corapi, who on Saturday evenings spends an hour sermonizing, teaching, and recounting stories that sometimes strain credulity. One of the more impressive chronicles -- God's Name Is Mercy -- concerns his reconversion. Corapi, now a priest professed to the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, was once a very bad boy.

Growing up in a working-class town in upstate New York, Corapi was raised a devout Catholic. But not every 7-year-old devout Catholic encounters a stranger in his grandparents' lilac-filled garden and later discerns he'd seen the Mother of God. She smiled and simply said, "Johnny." He'd meet her again decades later in a veterans' psychiatric hospital, where he nearly died while recovering from crack addiction, and again, at age 44, on the day he was ordained by Pope John Paul II. As he walked down the aisle of St. Peter's, Corapi says he saw a familiar face near the crowd of cardinals; she smiled, mouthed the word "Johnny," and the basilica filled with the perfume of lilacs.

But the testimony is not all fragrance and flowers. From childhood, Corapi had a penchant for violent sports -- boxing, football -- and graduated from high school determined to fight for the Special Forces in Vietnam. Late in his training, before being dispatched on a two-week solitary escape-and-evasion mission through the Okefenokee Swamp, he recalls his drill sergeant shouting, "If you can't even get to the battlefield, how you gonna fight?" Corapi reveled in the proving-ground misery of it. Despite that zeal, though, he sustained an injury in a helicopter accident, finished his tour in an administrative job, and was given an honorable discharge.

He never got to the battlefield. He says he took no consolation in being told that, within 90 days of arriving, every man on his team was killed. Embittered for having been denied the chance to die in a blaze of glory, Corapi resolved to live in one: he spent the next 20 years making millions selling real estate in Beverly Hills, partying with rock stars, and dating famous actresses. His tax write- offs included a red Ferrari that he drove recklessly, a gun within reach. Then he got hooked on drugs and wound up broke and homeless.

Corapi speaks candidly of how he got home again: how his mother had someone track him down on the streets of Los Angeles and get a Hail Mary prayer card to him; how she sent him a one-way ticket back to her crucifix-filled house; how, little by little, he began to pray the rosary; and how one day he woke up with an urge to make a confession, during which he realized he'd been called to the priesthood.

Apart from a few personal details, Corapi's dozens of recorded presentations avoid references to topical matters, averting the drawbacks of a narrative shelf life. Still, time is tough to hide in the face and body; as he gets older, he is erupting into his nascent pugilistic self, his private suffering bleeding to the surface. While he has multiple advanced degrees, including a doctorate in theology and a master's in sacred scripture, he remains rough around the edges. Of late, his bravado seems tempered by fear.

A conservative interpreter of Vatican II, Corapi is unfazed by his liberal detractors. He likens himself to the Prodigal Son but seems equally comparable to Cain: an errant soul sentenced to restless wandering yet endowed with a stigma -- less a blemish than a mark of divine protection. Over the past 15 years he claims he has flown more than a million miles to conduct weekend conferences across the nation and abroad. These events -- the substance of his ministry -- are adapted into audio and visual media sold on his Web site and selectively aired on EWTN. Unlike most religious empires, Corapi's is not tax-exempt, because it's not nonprofit. "This way," he declaims, grinning, "they don't get to tell me what to say." And what he has to say boils down to this frequently intoned declaration: "At the end, forever, you and I will be in heaven or hell. Period."

In some 50 lectures on the catechism of the Catholic Church -- which, judging by his appearance, were produced early in his ministry -- he spoke with the theatrical, melodic gentility of Bishop Sheen, one of his avowed role models. These days Corapi has abandoned conventional clerical garb, save the Roman collar. His head is closely shaved. He wears what he dubs "BDUs" -- a black battle-dress uniform for a man of the cloth; and in lieu of stars and bars, matching silver crosses gleam on his lapels. He's the Gen. George S. Patton of no-nonsense Catholicism, engaged in "immortal combat" in the last battle between good and evil.

John Corapi has finally found his war, and his military mind is focused on the weapons of faith. Ironically for someone who makes his living with the spoken word, he tells his listeners -- his troops -- that in the heat of conflict talk is cheap. "Pray, don't preach," he says. Some might call it a martial strategy to hear the silence of God.

Father John Corapi airs on Saturdays at 8 p.m. on EWTN. For additional times, check local listings.

(c) 2006 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.