9 October 2024 - Our Lady of Champion - homily for Wednesday of the 27th week in Ordinary Time - Psalm 117

There are not many apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary that have been officially sanctioned by the Church. In fact, on September 19 of this year, the Vatican made an official statement on Our Lady of Medjugorje, which started in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1981. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith for the Vatican approved the “spiritual experience connected with Medjugorje” as a place of pilgrimage, but declined to make a judgment about the supernatural character of the alleged private revelations associated with the shrine. 

That bring us to Our Lady of Champion, which is an officially sanctioned apparition right here in the United States. We celebrate the feast day of Our Lady of Champion is today. The apparition was formally approved on December 8, 2010, by Bishop David L. Ricken, becoming the first Marian apparition approved by the Catholic Church in the United States. 

The apparitions of Our Lady of Champion took place near Green Bay, Wisconsin in October 1859 and were seen by Adele Brise, a young woman who had immigrated from Belgium to the United States with her parents several years earlier. Adele first saw a woman in white standing between two trees.  When she told the parish priest about what she saw, he told her to ask, ”In the Name of God, who are you and what do you wish of me?” After seeing the apparition again, she asked with question, with the apparition replying, "I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same." The apparition told her to "gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.” She spent her whole life teaching children about the faith, eventually forming a group of lay women who lived according the rule of the Third Order Franciscans. Adele Brise died in 1896. 

Our psalm today states: “Go out to all the world, and tell the Good News.” We all are called to do that in different ways.  Through the apparition of Our Lady of Champion, Adele Brise received the call to educate children. But all of us, in our own way, are called to spread the Good News of the Gospel.