He said the faith is brought to us through witnesses, and reflected that Mother Angelica "with visionary genius understood the role you have to play in the new Information Age even the Catholic Church has now entered, whether she wants it or not. And that's why you are now all called to be witnesses in a completely new and very special way."
"This role is not necessarily undramatic," he said, adding that "you as Catholic media professionals are challenged to be better and more professional than your colleagues from non-Catholic media."
"God, for every need of the Church, calls men and women who will give us special assistance in all sorts of danger," the archbishop said.
"Thus, in the great confusion caused by presbyter Arius in the early Church, he called Athanasius the Great; in the chaos of the migrations of peoples, St. Columban; after the French Revolution, the holy parish priest of Ars – and so on. Only in this way can we understand what Mother Angelica from the 'Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration' really set in motion, when she began to build the spiritual channel EWTN in a garage of her monastery in Alabama, without any means and against all odds."
Archbishop Gänswein said that "by doing so, she implanted in the Catholic Church of America at that time a media power that did not depend on the bishops: a 'fourth power' so to say, in which faithful journalists disclose any sort of abuse just as intrepidly as they indicate dangerous wrong ways, on which some shepherds today seem to get lost just as they did in all times of history."
In light of the clerical and, indeed, episcopal abuse scandals, the archbishop exhorted, "as Catholic journalists you are not only responsible for the 'hard news' and a relentless and fair reporting, but more than ever for the core of all good news: the Gospel."