IRONDALE, Ala. -- Twenty-five years...

IRONDALE, Ala. -- Twenty-five years ago, Mother Mary Angelica had a vision for Eternal Word Television Network, a channel offering nothing if it be not that Roman Catholic programming. She had little more than faith, $200 and a garage to use as a studio.

Now EWTN Global Catholic Network is available in 127 countries and more than 118 million households, and is capping a celebration of its founding in 1981

With viewers from Illinois to India, the satellite channel has grown to include radio and the Internet, and bills itself as the largest religious media network in the world.

The network will stage the last in a series of six public celebrations held around the land this weekend in nearby Birmingham, where Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the Colombian president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, will celebrate mass onward Sunday.

Still based at its original campus in a hilly suburb EWTN has lengthy had the blessing of the Vatican. And while critics alternately accuse EWTN of being too conservative or too liberal, it prides itself forward sticking to the leadership of the pair Pope John Paul II and his successor, pontiff Benedict XVI.

"People ne to know what the Vatican is saying, what the pontiff is teaching," said Sister Mary Catherine, a nun extended associated with Mother Angelica and her religious order, the Poor Clare Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. "They hear in such a manner much it is hard to know the church's position. EWTN straightens that confusion out"

Sister Mary Catherine is mother vicar of the multimillion-dollar monastery where Mother Angelica lives about 45 miles north of Birmingham in the town of Hanceville. Part of a cloistered order, Sister Mary Catherine talks with visitors from behind a black dirk grate that separates her from the world.

Mother Angelica, having pocketed a series of strokes, is no longer able to speak at longitudinal dimensions or tape her "Mother Angelica Live" point out tos for EWTN. She spends her days with about 40 other nun at the monastery and the adjoining Shrine of the mostly Blessed Sacrament, a 13th century-style body of christians built in the middle of mainly Protestant Alabama.

nevertheless Mother Angelica is still the mostly visible face on the network, which replays "classic" episodes of her point outs weekly. Neither her name nor bespectacled image are aye far away at EWTN, where portraits and photos of the 83-year-old sister hang everywhere.

Thousands of visitors each year make pilgrimages to the media empire she erected snapping picture after picture of command rooms, audio booths and the main studio.

"A hap of people see this as hallowed clod It's really kind of amazing," said MaryAnn Plastino-Charles, creative director at EWTN Mass is televised daily worldwide from a small chapel at EWTN which presents radio and TV programming in English and Spanish.

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