The Apparition of Our Lady of Champion

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2024

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Adele Brise, an immigrant from Belgium, had a deep devotion to prayer. As a child she and friends made a vow to enter religious life and devote their lives to the service of the Lord. But when she was in her 20s her family emigrated from Belgium to Wisconsin, near present-day Green Bay. In 1859 she received a series of apparitions of the Blessed Mother who charged her to teach the faith to the children. She saw this as Our Lady encouraging her to make good on that vow she made as a child. She began to teach children everywhere, often just the children of one family in exchange for food. A group of women joined her in this work, and they eventually opened a school. But this little community of lay sisters faced much opposition within the Church. Multiple bishops challenged their devotion and doubted the apparitions. But the faith and devotion of Adele and her companions eventually won them all over. Over time a shrine and pilgrimage site developed where the apparitions took place. In 1871, the Peshtigo Fire burned nearly 1.5 million acred and killed up to 2,500 people. Many, many people fled to the chapel of Our Lady of Good Help for refuge. Everything around the shrine grounds for many miles was reduced to ash, but the shrine grounds was unharmed. In 2010, the Church officially recognized Our Lady of Good Help as an authentic apparition of the Blessed Mother, worthy of belief by all the faithful. In 2023 the title of the apparition was officially changed to Our Lady of Champion. The chapel and shrine remains an important and popular place of pilgrimage and prayer.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic history.
0:08.6	If you like our podcast, help others find it by sharing this episode and giving us
0:13.6	five-star rating wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16.9	I'm Noel Heister Crowe.
0:18.0	And I'm Tom Crow.
0:19.3	Today we're talking about the only approved Marian apparition in the United States,
0:25.5	the appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary to a Belgian immigrant woman near Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1859.
0:32.2	This apparition was only formally approved by the church in 2010,
0:37.4	so it took 150 years for the official
0:40.5	recognition to come. But even so, I had no idea that any Marian apparitions had been
0:46.0	approved in the U.S. until they randomly heard about this one within the last four or five years.
0:51.3	And I just find that amazing. I mean, Marian apparitions are kind of a big deal,
0:55.1	but the one that happened right here on our own soil has received so little attention.
0:59.5	There are likely a few reasons for that, which we'll get into. But let's start with the story of
1:04.4	the woman who had the vision and about what happened. Right. So the story begins in Belgium in the first half of the 19th century.
1:13.3	For various reasons, a good number of Belgians, particularly Catholic Belgians, had begun migrating
1:18.4	to the new world. By the 1850s, this had gone from pioneering individuals to whole communities
1:24.5	of families looking to migrate en masse. They settled in many places,
1:29.1	especially in the Midwest, but one place of real concentration was in northeast Wisconsin,
1:34.7	not far from Green Bay and up the Door Peninsula. That is, if you're looking at a map of Wisconsin,
1:40.3	Door Peninsula is that narrow peninsula on the east side of the state, which separates Green Bay from Lake Michigan.
1:47.4	Part of the draw to Wisconsin was that the state of Wisconsin had actually advertised in Belgium seeking immigrants to settle there.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Noelle & Tom Crowe, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Noelle & Tom Crowe and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.