On December 8, 2010, Our Lady of Good Help, a tiny shrine in Champion, Wisconsin, became the first Marian apparition site in the United States to receive official church approval. David L. Ricken, bishop of Green Bay, concluded a two-year investigation and determined that the story of how the Virgin Mary appeared to a Belgian nun in 1859 and the alleged supernatural phenomena associated with the shrine are “worthy of belief.” Catholics have been in the United States since Charles Carroll of Maryland was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Why has it taken two centuries for American Catholics to receive an official shrine of their own?

Since at least the third century, there have been literally thousands of apparitions of the Virgin Mary reported across all continents. But while Mary’s supernatural intervention is a cherished part of Catholic tradition, apparitions have always existed in tension with the Holy See. Mary’s frequent appearances to uneducated peasant girls, often accompanied by apocalyptic prophecies, have given fodder to the Church’s Protestant and rationalist critics. For this reason, Church authorities have approved only a handful of apparitions such as those at Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima. Furthermore, this approval is only conditional. Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758) introduced the distinction between private revelation (fides humana) and doctrine (fides catholica). In essence, the Church is only expressing tolerance for Catholics who choose to believe in these revelations.

But this suspicion of Marian piety also made Mary an appealing weapon against rationalism. The modern era of Marian apparitions began in France during the mid-nineteenth century. In the first years of the Second Republic, Mary began appearing all over France from Paris, to the village of La Salette, to a grotto at Lourdes. Conservative Catholics embraced Mary as the vanquisher of “Marianne,” an emblem representing the Enlightenment and the triumph of the Republic. This popular devotion was reinforced by Pope Pius IX, considered to be “a Marian Pope.” In 1854, he declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that Mary had been born without original sin. This was done without the full sanction of the Church council and is regarded as a rare use of Papal infallibility. Pius IX had been forced to flee Rome by Italian nationalists and he too saw Mary as a shield against revolution and change, declaring, “May the Blessed Virgin, who conquered and destroyed all heresies, uproot and destroy this dangerous error of Rationalism.”

While all this was underway, a wave of Belgium immigrants was settling in Wisconsin’s Green Bay peninsula. Adele Brise came to the area with her parents as a young girl. One year after the famous sighting in Lourdes, Brise too beheld a vision of a lady in dazzling white. The apparition ordered Brise to pray for the conversion of sinners and to spread the Catholic catechism to the frontier. A shrine erected near the site of the apparition is said to have healing powers and was adorned with crutches supposedly left behind by pilgrims who had once been disabled. During the great Peshtigo fire of 1871 in which 1.2 million acres burned and over 1,200 people died, the shrine remained unscathed, sheltering the pilgrims within.

The experience of American Catholics has been different from those in Mexico, Portugal, and France where Marian apparitions have received approval. As a religious minority, American Catholics have always struggled to prove that they can be both Catholic and American. While Adele Brise was building her convent, Catholic intellectuals like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson were seeking to reconcile Catholicism with American culture. Marian devotionalism seemed to be a vestige of the Old World, confirming that Catholics were antagonistic to progress and democracy, not to mention being superstitious and alien.

The tension surrounding Mary in America climaxed after the reforms of Vatican II. Many conservative Catholics, feeling betrayed by their Church, turned to a strange mix of Cold War paranoia and Marian supernaturalism. There was a resurgence of Marian seers in places like Necedah, Wisconsin, Bayside, New York, and Conyers, Georgia. In each case, church officials strongly condemned these apparitions. They were called an embarrassment to the church even as pilgrims arrived in droves. In 1975, Mary Ann Van Hoof, a particularly defiant seer, was placed under an interdict––a lesser form of excommunication.

The Church’s endorsement of Our Lady of Good Help marks an important milestone in American Catholicism and reveals how the Church’s priorities have shifted. It appears that supernaturalism is no longer a liability but an asset, part of the Catholic mystique.

References

The official website of the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help can be seen here: http://www.shrineofourladyofgoodhelp.com/

Erik Eckholm, “Wisconsin on the Map to Pray with Mary,” New York Times, 23 December, 2010.

Joseph Laycock is a PhD student in religion and society at Boston University, and the author of Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism (Praeger Publishers, 2009).