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During the first memorial sermon for Mother Angelica on Tuesday, in a chapel at the headquarters of EWTN Global Catholic Network in Irondale, EWTN Chaplain Joseph Wolfe described the last three days of Mother Angelica’s life and her death on Easter Sunday.
Wolfe noted that Mother Angelica had instructed her nuns to do everything to keep her alive, no matter how much she suffered, because every day she suffered, she suffered for God.
“Most of us would not think that way,” Wolfe said. “We would think, ‘Get me out of here…’ What’s taken out of that picture is the love of God.”
Mother Angelica wanted each day to be “one more act of suffering to God,” Wolfe said.
“This is the greatest power on earth, the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Wolfe said. “This was something that Mother understood. She wanted to love Him in return. That was her whole life.”
Wolfe then described how Mother Angelica went into her death throes on Good Friday.
“It was on Good Friday that I heard form one of the caregivers who was helping Mother, as well as one of the sisters,” Wolfe said. “Mother began to cry out early in the morning from the pain that she was having. She had a fracture in her bones because of the length of time she had been bedridden. They said you could hear it down the hallways, that she was crying out on Good Friday from what she was going through. These two people said to me she has excruciating pain.
Well, do you know where that word excruciating comes from? Ex, from, cruce, from the cross. Excruciating pain.”
“Her whole life really was colored with suffering,” Wolfe said. “We don’t think of her as someone who was downcast in her suffering but gave us courage in our own sufferings.”
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After the 3 o’clock hour arrived on Good Friday she was more calm, she was more peaceful,” Wolfe said. “On Holy Saturday, I also visited. I had this desire to thank her. We have benefited by her witness, her teaching.”
Wolfe left Mother Angelica’s side to officiate the Easter vigil on Saturday night in the chapel at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Several hundred people attended. “We had a beautiful Easter vigil,” Wolfe said. “At 5:30 in the morning, Mother Delores called me and said Mother was really struggling, she wasn’t doing very well. She wanted me to come over. I went over there, the sisters were already there.”
That’s when preparations for her death began with the last rites, he said.
“I anointed her, did the litany for the dying, **gave her the apostolic pardon **that the church grants to someone who is dying, and the sisters prayed their divine office around her bed - the morning prayers.”
Later that morning she received her last holy communion, called Viaticum when the consecrated bread and wine is given as part of last rites.
“At 10:30 Father Paschal offered Mass in her room and she received the precious blood, Viaticum, the food for her journey,” Wolfe said. “The precious blood by which we have been saved. All of us have been saved by the precious blood of Jesus…, a drop or two of the precious blood, into her mouth.”
Simply amazing her love of Christ and suffering, and what a beautiful death. I wish more priests knew about and administered the Apostolic Pardon.