As Cardinal Raymond Burke and the Institute in Europe were making their annual pilgrimage of vocations to the Basilica of St. Therese in Lisieux, France, on October 15, the canons and faithful of the Institute in the American Midwest made their first pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Robinsonville, near Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The apparition of Our Lady to Adele Brise on October 9, 1859, is the first Marian apparition in the United States to receive diocesan approval. It followed close upon the dedication of the United States to the Immaculate Conception in 1847, the proclamation of that dogma in 1854, and the Marian apparitions at Lourdes in 1858. The Queen of Heaven asked Sister Adele to pray and offer sacrifices for the conversion of sinners and to teach the catechism to the children of the region. Our Lady promised her help in this mission. Now more than ever, we should not hesitate to fly to Our Lady of Good Help to beg her assistance in educating the youth and building a true Catholic culture.
The farming area around the shrine is changing already.
“If the rumors are right, it’s going to look like downtown Chicago pretty soon,” says Louie Gomand, who owns a farm adjacent to the shrine.
A farm stand on his property sells vegetables and water to visitors. A sunflower costs 50 cents and a gourd 35 cents. A handwritten sign reads “bus specials.” There’s a lot more traffic, he says, but he has no complaints. Neither does Kelli Vissers, 34. She and her husband David, 38, own two buildings in Champion.
They have converted a small trailer into the mobile On the Way Café. Kelli Vissers said she hopes to cater meals for tourists and turn one of the buildings into a bed and breakfast and the other into a full-scale café.
Barb Cornette, 58, who grew up in the area and now helps run a dairy farm a couple miles from the shrine, says some residents have mixed feelings about its growing popularity.
“Traffic has increased tremendously,” she says. “Some of the area farmers that are retired want to sell their land ... for possibly a hotel, a restaurant. They’re looking for the gold mine, unfortunately,” she said.
For decades, Cornette says, the shrine was visited mostly by local people. “We felt like this was our chapel,” she says, “and now we have to share it with everybody — which is OK if they wouldn’t try to change it” by adding restaurants and other tourist accoutrements.
CHAMPION, Wis. – Philip and Barbara Hesselbein came to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help to pray for a grandson who has an inoperable brain tumor.
Darlene Searcy prayed for her family and for herself; she has cancer.
Mary Spakowicz, who also has cancer, came "because God will hear me here."
The afflicted and the faithful have long made pilgrimages to the quiet country site where Belgian immigrant Adele Brise said in 1859 that she saw the Virgin Mary three times. For the past few years, maybe 30 or 50 people had trickled in daily to visit the chapel, Brise's grave and the candlelit crypt that marks the site of the apparition.
That changed in December, when Bishop David Ricken of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Green Bay certified after investigations by three theologians that Brise had indeed seen a beautiful lady in white who said she was the "queen of heaven."
That made the shrine, which is a mile from the unincorporated town of Champion, the USA's only official site where Mary is said to have appeared.
Now there's a steady flow of traffic into the recently enlarged gravel parking lot. Cars, vans and buses bring 500 people — and often many more — here daily. License plates from Ohio, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana were spotted one recent weekday.
A new building houses much-needed restrooms.
A former boarding school on the site is being refurbished to house two priests recently assigned full time to the shrine.
"I knew that there would be some increase in interest" after he certified Brise's vision, Ricken says. "I wasn't sure how wide it would be, how broad it would be."
Our Lady of Good Help attracts far fewer visitors than international Marian shrines such as France's Lourdes, which draws 5 million a year, or Mexico's Our Lady of Guadalupe, which has double that.
Still, Ricken expects the number of visitors to continue to rise and says the diocese is trying to figure out how to accommodate them without losing "the simplicity of that beautiful shrine and the peace of the place."
Cornfields and towering grain silos line the Minnesota Catholics' approach to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help. The smell of manure wafts from nearby dairy farms.
But the parking lot where the motor coach stops is newly graveled, and plans to expand beyond the shrine's small brick church and gift shop are in progress. Because like this group from Hastings, pilgrims are coming.
It's here at this modest shrine in the heart of Wisconsin farm country, where Catholics believe the Virgin Mary appeared more than 150 years ago. Eight months ago, the bishop in nearby Green Bay officially validated the apparitions, making the shrine the first such holy site in the country and one of only a dozen or so in the world.
Since then, regular visitors to the site have grown from a few hundred a year to a few thousand a week. The Hastings group numbers 19.
For the Minnesota pilgrims, a miracle isn't the goal of their two-day trip, though they would welcome one. It's mostly about seeking a closer connection to the Almighty through the mother of Christ.
"It's like heaven touching earth," said Joanne Knoll, "It is very moving, to know she was there."
Mary Mancoske has attended the annual Mass to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption of Mary at the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help since 1958. And Monday’s ceremony was on par with the rest.
“It was just wonderful,” the Greenleaf native said.
Mancoske was concerned that the shrine’s newfound fame could dilute its sanctity.
“I just hope it doesn’t ruin the sacredness and get too commercial,” she said.
The small shrine gained international attention in December when the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay — with approval from the Vatican — officially recognized it as a site where the Virgin Mary had appeared. It’s the first and only such site in the United States.
An estimated 3,000 visitors gathered on the lawn outside the chapel on Monday to take part in the annual celebration that pays tribute to the Roman Catholic belief that the body of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, ascended into heaven along with her spirit. That’s more than twice as many as last year, when 1,200 people attended.
I relayed a story that back in the day, the Shrine would have upwards of 10,000 people show up for devotionals on the feast day. It looks like we might be on a return swing.
Originally I was going to take my family up to the shrine for the Assumption Feast but work is too busy right now to take time off. For any new readers, I'm a database programmer by trade. I work for the largest software company in the world that you've never heard of. I haven't got asked in a while, but no, I don't work for the diocese. Folks who like traditional liturgy, are anti-contraception, like technology, and are not afraid to talk about any of it are more likely to end up in the nuthouse than in a diocese(I'm slightly joking). But I digress.
It was here, in 1859, when the Blessed Mother appeared three times to a young Belgium immigrant, Adele Brise. The message of the Blessed Mother to Adele was to “gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”
The new rector of the shrine, Father Peter Stryker, hopes that message will continue to inspire pilgrims. Father Stryker and a fellow priest, both members of the Fathers of Mercy, a religious order of priests based in Kentucky, arrived in early July to take over the shrine’s daily operations at the request of Bishop Ricken.
“Both of us feel very welcomed and appreciated here,” said Father Stryker. “The holy traffic has indeed increased during these summer months. We feel honored to be serving at the first and thus far only site of Church-approved Marian apparitions here in the United States.”
Along with two new priests, the shrine has had to add new restrooms, expand the parking lot, and increase the corps of volunteers tenfold. Buses full of pilgrims from as far as Texas, Louisiana and Florida arrive regularly. This summer the shrine and bishop were featured on an ABC special about Marian apparitions.
With record crowds descending upon the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, two religious order priests now assigned to the diocesan shrine are tending to the visitors' spiritual needs.
Fr. Peter Stryker and Fr. Jewel Aytona, members of the Fathers of Mercy religious congregation based in Auburn, Kent., arrived in Champion July 7 at the request of Bishop David Ricken.
Following the Dec. 8, 2010, declaration that the Marian apparitions to Adele Brise in 1859 were worthy of belief, Bishop Ricken began making plans to find a religious community of priests to staff the shrine. Bishop Ricken chose the Fathers of Mercy because their congregation's apostolate matches the shrine's historic mission: to preach and catechize, said Fr. John Doerfler, chancellor and vicar general of the diocese.
Bishop Ricken became acquainted with the Fathers of Mercy several years ago when he led a retreat for members of the congregation, added Fr. Doerfler. The congregation's superior general, Fr. David Wilton, met with Bishop Ricken earlier this year and agreed to send two priests to staff the shrine
Less than 24 hours after a Brown County shrine was featured on national television, the man who declared it an official Marian apparition site is sharing his thoughts on the program.
Our Lady of Good Help was featured on a "Primetime Nightline" special. For the little shrine in the little community of Champion, the secret is out.
"I think they did a beautiful job on that," Green Bay Catholic Bishop David Ricken said of the way the shrine was featured.
"I think the solemnity of the shrine, its 150-year history, the simplicity of the message, the life of Adele Brice, how she lived out that mission the Blessed Mother gave to her, I think that came through in a very humble but striking way."
"I thought it'd be mostly in Wisconsin and the northern part of the country here, maybe neighboring states. I figured it'd take several years before people really heard about it or understood it, so I didn't dream of all this that's for sure," Bishop Ricken acknowledged.
The reality is, up to one thousand people a day are flocking to the shrine from around the country, praying for peace and healing.
"Some people ridicule it, but that's each person's choice. We're not forcing people to believe, of course; belief is a personal matter, but it needs to be listened to, and if something is there that attracts people, they need to pay attention to it because it may be a little invitation from God to get closer."
"We fill our lives with all kinds of things, much of which is really not that important, so going there to that shrine puts them in touch with God, who lives inside, and that deep longing for peace and unity with God that we were born with, we were created with."
To meet the needs of guests, the diocese has appointed two priests to serve full-time, as well as upgraded sidewalks and restroom facilities. More parking space is next on the agenda.
The bishop also plans to explore the possibility of building a larger church and conference center and expanding the gift shop.
I have it recorded but haven't watched it yet. The very beginning was... well, bad. But they weren't talking about the Good Help Shrine yet at that point.
