The Catholic Patriotic Minute #14: Our Lady of Champion
Catholics For Catholics Special Edition | October 6th, 2025
Our Lady of Champion: The First And Only Approved Marian Apparition in the United States
The Marian apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima, Guadalupe, and Lourdes are among the most well-known apparitions that millions of pilgrims visit every year, but some American Catholics might not know that we have our very own approved Marian Apparition in the United States. In early October of 1859, Our Lady appeared to Adele Brise in Wisconsin.
Adele Brise was born in Dion-le-Val, Belgium, on January 30, 1831. Once she received the Sacrament of Holy Communion for the first time, Adele and a few of her friends promised Mother Mary that they would be religious teaching sisters. However, her family’s move to the United States did not allow Adele to complete this promise.
A priest consoled Adele, by guiding her to be obedient to her parents and encouraging her to pursue this vocation to religious life in America, if God wills her to do so. In 1855, Adele and her family travelled to present-day Wisconsin over the span of six weeks and joined a large Belgian settlement there. After four years of serving her family with physical tasks, Adele would be called to more spiritual tasks by the Mother of God herself.
One day in early October in 1859, Adele was walking on an Indian trail, taking grain to the grist mill for her family, when a lady made Adele pause. She saw a lady, clothed in white, in between two trees, and the lady did not say anything. Shortly after, most likely on October 9, 1859, a Sunday, Adele was walking on the same trail with her sister and friend to Mass, which was at a church ten miles away. The same lady appeared to Adele again and still remained silent. After Mass, Adele consulted her priest, who advised her to ask the lady, if Adele saw her again, “in God’s name, who are you, and what do you want of me?”
On their way back home the same day, the lady appeared to Adele for the third time. Adele would later describe her as a lady, clothed in white with a yellow sash, golden hair cascading down her shoulders, and a crown of stars framing her head. The lady’s face beamed with light, almost blinding Adele. Adele asked the question posed by her priest, and the lady answered,
I am the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners. If they do not convert and do penance, my Son will be obliged to punish them.
Mother Mary, Queen of Heaven, asked Adele, “What are you doing here in idleness while your Companions are working in the vineyard of my Son?” Adele, crying out of sorrow, asked Mary, “What more can I do, dear Lady?”. Our Lady called on Adele to, “[g]ather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.” She further explained, “[t]each them their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do. Go and fear nothing, I will help you.”
With this particular calling from Our Lady in mind, Adele traveled door-to-door, walking up to twenty-five miles per day, to help families with chores if they allowed her to teach their children the catechism. Her new apostolate grew so much over the following years that she formed a religious community of women to evangelize the children and even their parents in the Catholic faith. At first, Adele’s father built a small chapel near the spot of the apparition of the Queen of Heaven, but eventually others offered money and their labor to build a larger chapel, convent, and school near the apparition site. There, the religious sisters would teach the children.
Twelve years after the apparitions, on October 8, 1871, the Peshtigo fire raged across Wisconsin. The Peshtigo fire is known as the most devastating fire in the United States, as it killed between 1,200 to 2,400 and it burned more than one million acres of land. Families ran to the apparition site, searching for shelter. Father Pernin, an eyewitness to this natural disaster, recounted,
The fire was extinguished, but dawn revealed the ravages wrought by the conflagration. Everything about them was destroyed; miles of desolation everywhere. But the convent, school, and chapel on the holy land consecrated to the Virgin Mary shone like an emerald isle in a sea of ashes. The raging fire licked the outside palings and left charred scars as mementos. Tongues of fire had reached the chapel fence, and threatened destruction to all within its confines; the fire had not entered the Chapel grounds.
The community considered the fire sparing the apparition site as a miracle. A year after, a practice began of those, whose lives were saved, visiting the apparition site on October 8 and praying at the chapel all night into October 9, the anniversary of both the fire and the second and third apparitions of the Queen of Heaven. This practice is still ongoing today, usually involving thousands of pilgrims praying at the shrine every year on October 8 and 9.
After this fire, Adele, alongside her religious sisters, educated and evangelized children until her death on July 5, 1896. She is buried near The Apparitional Chapel near the National Shrine. After an investigation, the Bishop of Green Bay asserted, with the approval of the Catholic Church, in 2010 that the apparitions of Our Lady were deemed “Worthy of Belief.” Then, in 2016, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared the grounds the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, later to be renamed the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion. It became the first National Shrine with an approved Marian Apparition in the United States.
Today, Catholics for Catholics answers the call of Our Lady of Champion, to catechize Americans in Catholic sacraments and doctrine, through our educational sources, including our podcast, The Catholic Champion, named after this Marian apparition. Our logo itself reflects our efforts to unite love of country with love for the Mother of God, Our Lady. The specific image of Our Lady in our logo is from the pastel painting of the Virgin Mary that George and Martha Washington hung in their dining room at Mount Vernon. Our Lady’s luminous face in this painting is similar to her face when she appeared as Our Lady of Champion, introducing herself as the Queen of Heaven. She beckoned Adele then, as she asks us now, to catechize her children, the citizens of this nation, so that they can achieve salvation. Let’s pray that more American Catholics answer her call.
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