This reflection on the 2024 Pilgrimage to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion was submitted by Michigan Area Chair, Hugh “Andy” Smith, KM.
The members of the American Association’s Michigan Area have returned home from the Pilgrimage to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, physically tired but spiritually refreshed after a wonderful extended weekend in the farm country northeast of Green Bay, Wisconsin.
It was an amazing two and a half days of prayer, Masses, Anointing of the Sick, processions, Adoration, Confession, and countless Rosaries, not to mention fellowship with brother and sister Knights and Dames from the Federal and Western Associations. The weather cooperated beautifully… not too hot, not too cold (or wet), just right. As is always the case with any event in the Order, we were truly blessed to share the time with our amazing Chaplains, who through their homilies, reflections, and earnest love of our Catholic faith, truly inspired us all. We shared meals and toasts, told stories, cried, laughed, and enjoyed the company of our dear friends in the Order. It was truly a blessed weekend.
The Michigan Area was twelve members strong, approximately one-third of all of the American Association members in attendance. A special thanks to June and Chris Rutkowski, Sean Shriner, Andrea McKenna, Barbara and Robert Wilson, Linda Couzens, Carolyn and Kristen Andree, and the inimitable Lourdes Andaya for joining Andrea and me. I was asked to put together a brief reflection on our pilgrimage and so I share the below with you. I hope that it gives you some small idea of what we experienced on a beautiful weekend on the shores of Lake Michigan.
“I am the Queen of Heaven[.]”
In the fall of 1859, Our Lady appeared in present day Champion, Wisconsin three times to Adele Brice, an uneducated farm immigrant from Belgium, who had been devoted to our blessed mother since the time of her first holy communion. When Adele told her local parish priest about the initial apparitions, he instructed her to ask of the apparition, “in God’s name, who are you?”. When Adele dutifully followed this advice the next time the apparition appeared, the dazzling figure, clothed in white, with a gold sash, and a head of wavy blond hair crowned with stars, 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.”
On the one hand, we cannot imagine what it must have been like to have literally stumbled upon Our Lady while walking along a rural forest path taking grain to the mill to be made into flour to feed the family its daily bread. But we do not have to imagine. Because the message Adele received is remembered and clearly resonates with us today. There is no question what we are asked by our Blessed Mother to do – we are to pray, take communion, and make confession for the conversion of sinners, so that they will convert and do penance and not face the punishment of our Lord. Our Lady made clear in that simple message to Adele, that we are all in this together, and it is not enough for us to atone for our sins, but we must also pray for others that they also atone for their sins.
“Blessed are they that believe without seeing.”
The first time Our Lady appeared to Adele, she was alone. The second and third times, a sister and a neighbor accompanied her. Those accompanying Adele could neither see nor hear Mary, yet when Adele told them to kneel before the Queen of Heaven, they did so, prompting Mary’s echoing of her own Son’s words, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed (John 20:29).” Adele went on to build a community of women who, despite the fact that they were not present when Mary appeared to Adele, was nonetheless dedicated to working with her and following Mary’s instructions. We, too, did not personally witness Mary’s apparition in 1859, but we still feel her loving presence today, nearly 165 years later, at the Shrine in Champion, and especially in the Apparition Oratory, the site that sits where Mary appeared between the maple and the hemlock trees to Adele so long ago. Without seeing, but with confidence in the message of the Queen of Heaven, we believe, and we ask Our Lady of Champion to pray for us.
“What are you doing here in idleness… [g]ather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”
At her first communion, Adele had promised Mary that she would dedicate her life to teaching the faith to children. We all make promises – to ourselves, our families, our careers, our faith lives – that we do not always keep. In between the making of the promise and the completing of the promise, “life happens” as we are pulled in a million different directions by a million different interests competing for our attention. Adele was no different, and one could hardly have expected her to actually follow through on a promise she made as a young first communicant, especially after her parents took the family and immigrated to the other side of the world. But Mary remembered, and a promise is a promise. Rarely are we so clearly called out on our failures to keep our promises as was Adele by the Queen of Heaven, resplendent in her crown of stars. Mary reminded Adele once, and Adele did not need to be reminded again, embarking on an incredible life of catechizing and forming the youth in the Catholic faith. As Dames and Knights of the Order of Malta, we have each made a lifetime commitment to defend the Catholic faith and give personal service to our Lords, the poor and the sick, no matter the different directions that our lives may be pulling us, or how antiquated the concepts may seem in the secular, modern world. Mary’s reminder to Adele is a reminder to us all that we must keep our promises.
“Go and fear nothing, I will help you.”
Our blessed Mother does not seem to appear to world renown doctors, leading statesmen, captains of industry, successful barristers, or the like. Bernadette Soubirous was a fourteen-year-old girl living in poverty. Juan Diego was an uneducated peasant. Sr. Lucia and her two cousins Francisco and Jacinta were illiterate children. And Adele was no different. Though she had longed to be a teacher, she received only the rudimentary education of a farm girl. When the Queen of Heaven gave Adele her mission, she was already 28 years old, far beyond the age at which one would get a teacher’s education. Adele clearly felt inadequate to the task set before her. “But how shall I teach them who know so little myself?” she asked the Queen of Heaven. Mary’s response, one we hear so many times in the Bible, was as true for Adele then as it is for us today – no matter what the thoroughly modern person may say; what our unbelieving friends laugh about; what the so-called “cancel culture” will do to us. Fear nothing. Mary, and her Son, will be at our side, helping us through it all.
A special thank you to those who could not attend this year’s pilgrimage but were praying for the pilgrims. God bless you all.
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