Apparition of Mary, Champion, Wisconsin: A Pilgrimage? Not for Me

Mary, mother of Jesus, appeared to Sister Adele Brise in 1859.

At least, that's what folks in the Champion, Wisconsin, area have been saying for the last century-and-a-half. And the Bishop in Green Bay says it's okay.

Someone claiming to see Mary, or Jesus, in a slice of toast - or mayonnaise jar - or whatever - isn't all that uncommon.

I've got a pretty lively imagination myself, and could probably 'see' Elvis outside the window: provided I gave my brain a running start.

What happened in Wisconsin is not the American equivalent of someone seeing Queen Elizabeth II in a marmalade jar.

The Champion, Wisconsin, Marian apparition stands out because it's gotten approval of the Church. (December 8, 2010) Which is a first for the United States. (CNA)

Pilgrimage to Champion, Wisconsin: Count Me Out

There's a pilgrimage from the town I live in, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, going to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, Champion, Wisconsin, this May. Father Todd Schneider, a parish priest from town, will be the spiritual director. The pilgrimage is co-sponsored by JeriCo Christian Journeys (jericochristianjourneys.com) in Mora, Minnesota, and Archangel Books & Gifts in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

I won't be going.

Even though Father Statz, our parish priest, mentioned it after Mass today.

Part of my reason for staying in town is economic. I'm sure that the cost, $260 per person, is reasonable for this sort of thing. That's still quite a lot of money for this household.

Besides, I am not convinced that a pilgrimage is necessary - or would be useful. For me.

But that's me. I recognize that quite a few folks make pilgrimages a part of their faith. I've made the point before, that lockstep conformity isn't what the Catholic Church is about. We're each supposed to bring something different to the Church. (August 26, 2010)

Definition Time - What's a Pilgrimage?

Pilgrimage:

• a journey to a sacred place
  (Princeton's WordNet)

That raises the question of just what "sacred place" means - but I'm willing to assume that it could mean a place where the mother of my Lord appeared to Sister Adele Brise.

Some Town in Wisconsin, and Mary, Queen of Heaven

Here's part of what the Catholic News Agency said about the Champion, Wisconsin, apparition:

"With approval from Bishop David L. Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a chapel in the town of Champion is now the first approved Marian apparition site in the United States.

"On Dec. 8, 2010 -the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception- the bishop decreed with 'moral certainty' that the Virgin Mary had indeed appeared to a young Belgian immigrant woman, Adele Brise, on three occasions in October of 1859.

"Since 1861, the site of those apparitions has been home to a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary under her title 'Our Lady of Good Help.' Following a two-year investigation of the alleged apparitions, Bishop Ricken proclaimed them 'worthy of belief,' and confirmed his diocese's official recognition of the popular shrine.

"During each of those three apparitions, a lady in shining white clothes appeared to Adele. The third time, she identified herself as 'the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners.'..."
(CNA)

The point of a pilgrimage isn't just dragging my body across the Minnesota/Wisconsin border and spending time in a town near Green Bay, Wisconsin. A pilgrimage is a way to express - physically - commitment to living a Christian life.

Not my idea: I lifted that from a document on the Holy See's website:

"Popular piety is characterized by a great variety and richness of bodily, gestural and symbolic expressions: kissing or touching images, places, relics and sacred objects; pilgrimages, processions; going bare-footed or on one's knees; kneeling and prostrating; wearing medals and badges... . These and similar expressions, handed down from father to son, are direct and simple ways of giving external expression to the heart and to one's commitment to live the Christian life. Without this interior aspect, symbolic gesture runs the risk of degenerating into empty customs or mere superstitions, in the worst cases."
("Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy. Principles and Guidelines," Vatican City (December 2001))

Okay: So pilgrimages are a long-standing tradition (small "t") in the Catholic Church, symbolic gestures "giving external expression ... to one's commitment to live the Christian life."

My hat's off to the folks who go: but I still think I'll be staying home during May. But I've been wrong before.

Related posts:

• "Wisconsin Apparitions Okay: Champion, Wisconsin: Not Necedah"
  (December 8, 2010)
• "Unity, Diversity, and Being Catholic"
  (August 26, 2010)
• "Mother Teresa of Calcutta's Sandals; Relics, and Minnesota"
  (July 25, 2010)
  Particularly
  • One Guy With a Blog's Take on Mother Teresa, a Centurion, and Jesus
• "Miracles, Mass, Bread and Wine"
  (June 7, 2010)
• "Saints: That's so Medieval"
  (February 14, 2010)

In the news:

• "Wisconsin chapel approved as first US Marian apparition site"
  Benjamin Mann, CNA (Catholic News Agency) (December 9, 2010)

Background:

• "Worthy of belief"
  Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin
  • "Brief history of the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion" (.pdf)
  • "Basic information on apparitions at Champion" (.pdf)
  • Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help
    Serving the Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin
    Champion, Wisconsin
• "Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy. Principles and Guidelines,"
  15; Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Vatican City (December 2001)
• "Holy Land Pilgrimage Guidelines" (.pdf)
  United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (Revised December 2008)
• "Tourist or Pilgrim?"
  Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (2000)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church
  • Life as a pilgrimage 1013
  • Pilgrimages and prayer 2691

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Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Church: Yeah, She's Pretty Important

First:

¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!

Or, 'long live Our Lady of Guadalupe!'¹

I'll get back to Our Lady of Guadalupe later, in another post.

Mary and Catholics

Mary, Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church, is a pretty big deal for many Catholics: myself included.

But we don't worship her.

She wouldn't like it.

And she's one lady I don't intend to cross.

"Do Whatever He Tells You."

Someone described Jesus as "a nice Jewish boy who obeyed his mother, grew up, and went into his father's business." Informal tone aside, that's a fairly accurate description.

The second chapter in the Gospel of John starts out with Jesus and his mother at a wedding party in Cana. Then, as now, drinks were being served. And Mary noticed that the supply of wine was giving out.

After a bit of discussion with Jesus, Mary turned to people who were serving and said: "Do whatever he tells you." (John 2:5)

Six stone jars, some water, and a miracle² later, they had, if I've got the numbers right, between 120 and 180 gallons of wine. John doesn't say, but I'd think that would have been enough to keep the party going for a while.³ The whole Cana account is in John 2: 1-11. There's a short discussion of it in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1613.

Whether someone insists that the Cana incident was strictly, purely, completely spiritual - having nothing whatsoever to do with demon rum and related substances - or the reader is willing to take the words at face value, what we've got here is Mary pointing out to Jesus that there's something to be done. Then, getting an at-best equivocal response, she confronts the staff and directs them to: "Do whatever he tells you."

Mary, Queen of Angels

The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary lists one of Mary's titles as "queen of angels."

Governments and occupations have changed a little in the last two thousand years, so I've found it helpful, when thinking about God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit⁴, to occasionally use contemporary equivalents for the titles and occupations.

"Queen of angels" doesn't take that much work. "Queen" means ruler - or, without too much stretching, leader or administrator.

The angels are servants of God, and one of God's titles is "Lord of hosts." I don't think it's so much of a stretch to think of the angels as a military outfit.

Which would make Mary the ruler or administrator of a military outfit.

European tradition has generally shown angels as having wings. That would make them an airborne military outfit. Sort of like the United States Air Force, but with substantially more firepower.

The head of the U. S. Air Force has the rank of general.

So, among other things, Mary is the general of a seriously-powerful military outfit.

"Fiat"

The first chapter of Luke, starting with verse 26, tells about a conversation between Gabriel and Mary. Her response was: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word."

Yes, that's meek and mild. It also took a lot of guts. Given what's recorded in our Old Testament, she must have known that these special assignments tended to be somewhere between rough and fatal.

So, Mary is a woman who accepted without flinching an assignment that she knew would be a rough one, who was up to telling the Son of God (she knew, better than most, just who Jesus was) to perform his first sign, who stuck it out with her son under the cross, and who is now, in contemporary terms, a very powerful general.

No, I do not want to cross her.

Mary, Mother of the Church

I can see how people who don't know all that much about the Catholic church could get the idea that we worship Mary. We call her "Mother of God," have statues representing her, and quite a number of prayers that involve her. Yeah: that looks like worship. Sort of.

About that "Mother of God" title: That doesn't, as far as I know, imply that she's superior to God. She, is, however, the mother of Jesus. Jesus is part of the Trinity. For practical purposes, Jesus is God. Calling Mary "Mother of God" isn't all that crazy, looking at it that way. At least, not for me.

"Mother of the Church" is the fifth title of Mary in The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, between "Mother of Christ" and "Mother of divine grace."

By the way: Article 9, Paragraph 6 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church discusses "Mary-Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church". I'd recommend reading it. Quite a few things that 'everybody knows' just ain't so - among Catholics as well as everybody else.

What many Catholics have is a devotion to the Virgin Mary. That sort of devotion is not worship. (Catechism, 971) When we look at Mary, we find her pointing at Jesus, still saying: "Do whatever he tells you."

Good advice, I think.

Vaguely related posts:

• "Our Lady of Guadalupe: Empress of the Americas"
  (August 11, 2009)
• "Mother's Day: A Nice Cultural Tradition, and a Quite Catholic Celebration"
  (May 10, 2009)
• "Reflections on Isaiah, 2nd Corinthians, the Gospel of Mark, and Saint Faustina"
  (March 7, 2009)
• "Playboy Cover Didn't Play With Mary: Allegedly"
  (December 15, 2008)

In the news:

• "Nearly 22,000 people pack arena for festival honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe"
  The Catholic Sun (August 10, 2009)

---

Hats off to thecatholicsun, on Twitter, for the heads-up on their article.

¹ (I know: "viva" is the imperative form of vivir, and a literal translation would be "live!" - but since saying "live! Our Lady of Guadalupe!" would sound like a line out a particularly weird remake of Frankenstein, I decided to use a contextually-appropriate, nearly-equivalent phrase from American English.)

² Someone jokingly suggested that the miracle of getting wine from water and stone jars wasn't that big a deal. People interested in wine-making put their vineyards on stony soil: I understand it's chiefly the minerals that give wine its various tastes. The ingredients for wine were already there: water and stone. 'All' Jesus did was get the process over with in record time: without grapevines, sunlight, and fermentation.

³ The literal translation of how much those stone jars held is "two or three measures" - and the Attic liquid measure was 39.39 liters. That translates, a bit freely, as 20 or 30 gallons per jar. (New American Bible, John, Chapter 2, footnote 5)

⁴ No, Christians are not polytheists - the Trinity is one God, three persons. If you find that a bit confusing, you're not alone.

Going on Vacation? Take God Along

The Zenit article starts out with "Benedict XVI is proposing that the way to live an authentic life is by leaving moments for God, as much during work as during vacation...."

It's a good idea. My family doesn't take vacations all that often: a matter of economics, rather than belief or preference. When we have, though, we didn't think about not carrying on with our usual devotions.

At the very least, a decade or so of the Rosary is a pretty good way of passing time when driving between two points.

On the rare occasions when we were away from home on Sunday, finding a church to attend for Mass was pretty simple: looking them up ahead of time helped.

And, again at the very least, we saw some rather nice places that way. There was a small church north of Park Rapids, Minnesota, with an outdoor walk-around rosary - and one of the nicer 'Lourdes' grottoes I've seen. Then there was the business trip to the Boston area, and one of the nicest-looking small churches I've seen.

The point is: devotions and worship are - or should be - a part of life for practicing Catholics . At work, on vacation, or whatever you're doing. In my experience, the yoke really is easy, and the burden light. (Matthew 11, 30)

Vaguely related posts:

• "Being Christian, Being Catholic: No Half-Measures"
  (May 20, 2009)
• "Being Counter-Cultural in 21st Century America"
  (March 17, 2009)
• "Dying to Ourselves, Dying to Self: Not Exactly a Feel-Good Religion?"
  (March 3, 2009)
• "Conservative? Liberal? Democrat? Republican? No, I'm Catholic"
  (November 3, 2008)

In the news:

• "Pope: Don't Forget God on Vacation"
  ZENIT.org News Agency, via EWTN (June 3, 2009)

Divine Mercy Sunday: a Few Words, a Link or Two

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday: the second Sunday of Easter.

There's a devotion to the Divine Mercy in Sauk Centre, where I live, that's into its third decade. The whole community was dedicated to the Divine Mercy in 1982, the year my wife and I married. There's a bit more detail about the local devotion in a Mercy Sunday homily from 2002.

There's a chaplet and a novena associated with the Divine Mercy devotion. (A chaplet is a collection of prayers, a novena is a set of prayers said over a nine-day period.)

And, a great deal more information at:

Marians of the Immaculate Conception
Association of Marian Helpers
Stockbridge, MA 01263-0004

1 800 462 7426

www.marian.org