c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Either Raymond Arroyo has really cagey insights into how to promote his first book, or the publishing gods are smiling down upon him.

On the other hand, weather gods have caused the 35-year-old author and his family a world of trouble. We’re talking New Orleans-style trouble. Every writer knows that, in this business, you learn to take the bad with the good.

His book, released in September, is “Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve and a Network of Miracles” (Doubleday, $23.95). It is a biography of the 82-year-old nun who launched the Eternal World Television Network in 1981.

By the time failing health compelled her to withdraw as CEO in 2001, the Catholic enterprise had grown to become one of the biggest religious media operations in the world.

Arroyo, a longtime anchor on the network, has just begun a six-month tour that will take him to more than two dozen stops across the country.

Never mind the big money that publisher Doubleday is investing in the 371-page book or Arroyo’s stamina or even his telegenic looks and charm.

The personal tale alone of this New Orleans native could encourage a lot of people to take notice, especially following Hurricane Katrina’s deadly sweep through his hometown.

Within the last month or so, his first daughter, Mariella Elizabeth Arroyo, arrived, his first book hit the shelves, and the hurricane blew a tortuous flood through his house in suburban Metairie.

Three generations of Arroyos have taken refuge in Birmingham, Ala. (where EWTN and Mother Angelica’s Our Lady of the Angels Monastery are located). Meanwhile, the author will be penning autographs for book buyers from Buffalo to Sacramento; Corpus Christi, Texas, to Kalamazoo, Mich.

In a phone conversation, Arroyo was quick to credit his subject for inspiring him with what a religious life can be.

“The book is really the story of a great entrepreneur and CEO _ she really did start this media empire in a garage,” he said. But he also considers it “an intimate biography of this broken girl from Canton, Ohio, who, through determination and faith, found a mission in life.”

The broken girl was Rita Rizzo, born in 1923 in the wrong part of Canton to whom many would say were the wrong kind of parents. So rough was her childhood that Arroyo titled his first chapter “One Miserable Life.”

Chapter 2 continues the dark strain. Its title: “The Gift of Pain.” Throughout the book, Arroyo uses themes of hardship, gritty determination and disappointment to frame Mother Angelica’s life, which he considers “a great tale of faith.”

He also shows the messy side of her upbringing, including her abusive father’s absence through much of it, and glimpses of her occasional crankiness. After McKinley High School, she left Canton and soon entered a convent.

The writer referred to “the bumps, the inconsistencies of this woman,” including serious disputes she had with the American hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the emergence of a range of health problems.

“She and I share a hatred of saccharine biographies,” Arroyo said. In fact, “she told me, `I wish you 40 years of purgatory if you sugarcoat my life.’ So, no, she doesn’t come off as some plastic saint in this book.”

Arroyo was working as Mother Angelica’s employee when he approached her in the late 1990s with a proposal that he write her biography. He is, and has been for years, news director and lead anchor at EWTNews and was co-host of a program with his subject when she was active in broadcasting.

The writer said her willingness to present herself as she is “is why she captured the hearts of people, making spirituality simple and accessible.”

Arroyo’s yearslong connection to this surprising religious figure is something the devout Catholic said he carries with him all the time.

And, as the owner of a now-submerged Louisiana home and a native of the Crescent City who knows his hometown might never fully recover, “It’s good to have something like her vision to rely on,” he said.

MO/JL END BENTAYOU

(Frank Bentayou is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

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