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 east of Green Bay 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.