Vatican City, Sep 9, 2016 / 09:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- During the general audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis blessed a framed picture of Mother Angelica, the foundress of EWTN.

“She's up there (in heaven) because she was a great woman,” the Holy Father said Sept. 7 to the EWTN employees who will now take the picture to their new offices to be opened in Cologne.

The director of EWTN in Germany, Martin Rothweiler, commenting on the meeting with the Pope, said that he blessed the picture with “great cordiality and sympathetic feeling.”

This is not the first time the Holy Father has referred to Mother Angelica.

In February he sent her a blessing while traveling to Mexico; in March he blessed another picture of the religious, and in July he commented that she was “a holy woman” in a meeting with an American priest who currently lives in Rome.

The beloved and well remembered religious died March 27 at 92 years of age.