Adele Brice

Adele Brice (also spelled Brise in many sources) was born in 1831 at Dion-le-Val in the Belgian province of Brabant, into a Catholic farming family of Walloon background. In 1855 she emigrated with her parents and siblings to the United States, joining other Belgian settlers on the forested Door Peninsula of northeastern Wisconsin. The family took up land in the rural district later known as Champion (then often called Robinsonville). Adele had received little formal schooling and remained unmarried; she had earlier wished to enter religious life in Belgium, but family circumstances and the move to America delayed any such step.

In October 1859, while walking a wooded trail near the family farm, she reported three apparitions of a lady clothed in white, wearing a yellow sash and a crown of stars around her head. On the third occasion the figure identified herself as the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners and instructed Adele to gather the children of that sparsely settled country and teach them what they needed to know for salvation, including the catechism, the Sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments. Adele thereafter gave herself entirely to this work. She walked long distances through woods and poor roads, in all seasons, to instruct immigrant children who otherwise had almost no access to priests or Catholic schooling. With her father’s help a small chapel was built at the site of the visions.

Adele and several companions formed a modest community of women who lived in poverty, adopted a simple habit, and followed Franciscan tertiary spirituality. They opened a boarding school beside the chapel so that children could receive both elementary and religious instruction. In October 1871 the Great Peshtigo Fire devastated the peninsula, destroying farms, forests, and settlements across a wide area; the chapel, school, and the few acres immediately around them were left unharmed, an event the local Catholic population attributed to the protection of the Virgin Mary. Adele continued to teach and to care for the shrine for the remainder of her life.

She died in 1896 at the community she had founded and was buried on its grounds. The site grew into a place of pilgrimage and was eventually designated the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help. In 2010 the Bishop of Green Bay, after a canonical investigation, declared the 1859 apparitions worthy of belief, the first Marian apparition in the United States to receive such diocesan approval. Adele herself has not been beatified or canonized; she is remembered as a humble Belgian immigrant and Franciscan tertiary whose reported visions and subsequent catechetical labors established a lasting center of Marian devotion in the American Midwest.