by Eileen Wirth

The Eternal Word's Television Network's Fr. Mitch Pacwa, SJ, reaches an audience of millions – and he does it all from an airchair.

When Fr. Mitch Pacwa, SJ, was in Jesuit studies in the 1970s, he experimented with drugs and dabbled in New Age phenomena such as astrology.

Today, after many intervening years of prayer and study and maturation, it's a different story: he's now a staunch defender of traditional Catholicism, and his weekly programs on prayer, Scripture, the Rosary, and Pope John Paul II's encyclicals reach 105 million homes worldwide via the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). When the Catholic cable network's founder, Mother Angelica, suffered a stroke in 2001, he took over her program slots.

"I definitely consider it to be God's grace that I'm still a Jesuit," says Pacwa.

Pacwa, who speaks twelve languages and has a doctorate in Old Testament from Vanderbilt, recounted his journey from spiritual rebel to traditionalist in his semi-autobiographical book Catholics and the New Age. It attacks the idea that such phenomena have any place in Catholic spirituality.

"I wanted to show how they had harmed me, how I survived, and that it was worth surviving and getting out of," he says.

Pacwa, 55, grew up mostly in Chicago, though for a time his family moved frequently as his father "followed the race track," repairing pari-mutuel betting machines before becoming a used car salesman.

Pacwa decided to become a priest in fourth grade after being inspired by a book about Xavier's missionary work in Japan. He graduated from Quigley North, the minor seminary in Chicago, but instead joined the Jesuits to rescue him from the stock market, of all things.

"I was working to make some money to pay for my tuition and I invested in the stock market," he says. "I started to like the stock market so well that I could see it was becoming a temptation. It could have become more of a focus than the priesthood. I began to think about the religious life because I wouldn't have to own anything." He entered the Jesuits in 1968 after attending Loyola University Chicago for a year. Later he became the first person in his family to graduate from college.

Pacwa's early Jesuit career included working with gangs in Chicago--he once witnessed a gangland execution--and several reluctant stints of high school teaching. He persuaded his superiors to allow him to work on a doctorate at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee--a move that led accidentally to his career in religious broadcasting.

He and a friend, a recent convert to Catholicism, were doing errands when they heard an anti-Catholic sermon on a Nashville Protestant radio station. Pacwa called the station to protest; the manager said there was nothing she could do because the preacher had paid for the time. But then she invited Pacwa to appear on a call-in show.

"I had a great time," he says, and so did the listeners. Local Catholics who "had been putting up with anti-Catholicism for a long time" raised money for a program Pacwa hosted, "A Catholic View of Scripture." Through this show and other broadcasts he came to the attention of Mother Angelica, founder of EWTN, who invited him to be a guest on her show. Their first meeting was inauspicious.

"At the time, I was just a grad student and I was wearing my blue jeans, flak jacket, boots, and hunting hat," remembers Pacwa. "It just happened that when I showed up, she was walking down the hall and she walks up to me and says, 'Can I help you?' I said, 'Hi, Mother Angelica. I'm your guest tonight, but don't worry--I clean up real good.' "

Fr. Mitch Pacwa, SJ, greets Dr. Dolores Grier, of the Archdiocese of New York, one of many guests who have graced his EWTN Live interview show.

During a break in the program, Mother Angelica invited Pacwa to do his own series for the network. His first was on the Book of Psalms, done as a retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises. He continued to produce shows for EWTN on prophets and other Scriptural and devotional topics after receiving a doctorate in 1984, combining this work with teaching at Loyola University Chicago and later at the University of Dallas. But his growing interest in EWTN and its mission ultimately led to his move to Birmingham, Alabama, EWTN's home, and full-time work there.

Pacwa's regular EWTN programs include EWTN Live, during which Pacwa interviews guests, and The Holy Rosary in the Holy Land, a fifteen-minute program in which Pacwa takes viewers "to the exact sites in the Holy Land for each of the Mysteries of the Rosary." Another of his shows, Threshold of Hope, focuses on Pope John Paul II's encyclicals.

"Our viewers are hungry for this," says Pacwa. "They keep telling me no one has really gone over John Paul's encyclicals. This is something brand new to them. I'm teaching them to think theologically. I love it. To me, TV's a classroom, only you don't have to correct the papers. I'm continuing the Jesuit apostolate of teaching."

In addition to this full-time work at EWTN, Pacwa has many sidelines, including Ignatius Productions, a religious video and audio company. Ignatius Productions accepts commissions to produce educational and religious tapes for groups that cannot afford commercial rates, such as the Church of Sudan, he says.

"We did one for the [Jesuits'] Polish Province to promote a school that the Jesuits had taken over. I've done a series in Israel on the pope's encyclical, 'Mother of the Redeemer.' "

Other tapes feature Pacwa teaching at shrines around the world. A recent video promotes a pro-life clinic in San Diego that provides continuing medical care for children who might otherwise have been aborted.

Pacwa stresses that his traditional Catholicism includes a nonpartisan concern for the poor. "I make sure that we address issues of the poor Church and the persecuted Church. My concern is what will help the poor the most. I would tend to more Republican approaches than I used to but I'm not committed to a party per se. I have to be committed to what is right. When I have criticized pro-abortion politicians by name, and I've only done it once, I made sure to have the same mber of Republicans as Democrats. We have to try to save lives and help the women who are in such a horrendous situation that they are considering abortion."

Dr. Eileen Wirth is professor and chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Creighton University. A former newspaper reporter and freelance author, she is also a member of Company's board of directors.

Part of Pacwa's appeal to TV viewers stems from his refusal to take himself too seriously. On camera, he's relaxed and conversational, indulging frequently in gently self-deprecating humor that EWTN's studio audiences obviously enjoy.

"We're just ourselves," he remarks. "I'm not an actor. It would be awfully weird to have the programs staged. I want to be relaxed with folks. When things are going wrong, I tease about it. If I mess up, I say so. That's life."

As the only Jesuit in all of Birmingham, Pacwa misses living in a Jesuit community, but he remains connected by staying at Jesuit communities as often as possible during his frequent travels. He often invites Jesuits to be guests on his shows and produces Jesuit-related programs such as an interview with Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach.

Pacwa also regularly says mass at St. Elias Catholic Church in Birmingham, a Maronite Rite parish whose members are mostly of Lebanese descent. Parts of the liturgy are in Aramaic, one of his twelve languages.

"I say that I was born Polish but I'm born-again Lebanese," says Pacwa.

He has authored two other books, Forgive Me Father for I Am Frustrated and Some Heard Thunder, Some Heard God. He has visited Israel more than 40 times, often to produce programs showing where Scriptural events occurred. He is active in Muslim-Christian dialogue and has co-produced a five-part video series, Islam and Christianity.

Pacwa used to play the mandolin to relax, but arthritis has made this difficult. He has benefited from experimental treatments for the disease and enjoys working out--and life in general.

"I have a lot of work to do, but it's a lot of fun," Pacwa says. "I love the work we do as priests. Sitting back is nonsense. There's too much good stuff to do. There's so much need in the Church, I don't know how you would have time to be bored."

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) is on the air 24 hours a day via cable and satellite to more than 85 million homes in 110 countries. But it had pretty humble beginnings in 1981.

Shortly after Mother Angelica, a Poor Clare nun, founded Our Lady of Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, in the '60s, she began writing short books on religious themes. The demand for the pamphlets was so great that the monastery bought a printing press and started shipping them worldwide.

The many requests Mother Angelica began receiving to give spiritual talks led her to videotaping her presentations at a Birmingham TV studio and then building a small TV studio in a garage at the monastery. Necessity, strong faith, and generous contributions combined to allow her to develop EWTN over the years to its current level of broadcast sophistication.

Today, EWTN's offerings, in English and Spanish, include shows for young adults and children, documentaries on Church history, programs on Church teaching, pilgrimages, rosaries, and live daily mass among many other offerings, including Pacwa's very popular interview show, EWTN Live.

With its world-class production and broadcast facilities and focus on cable and satellite transmission, EWTN's decision in the early '90s to devote resources to shortwave radio might seem to be a regression, but the move allowed English and Spanish radio broadcasts to reach a potential audience of hundreds of millions in places not reachable by television or cable broadcasts, places where TVs themselves are rare. And the letters keep coming in from these new listeners from all over the world.

Visit EWTN's website, www.ewtn.com, for more details about this network's offerings.

For more information about Pacwa's Ignatius Productions, go to www.fathermitchpacwa.org