Holy Virgin Mary of Good Help

Holy Virgin Mary of Good Help is a title of Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, used especially for the Marian devotion centered on the apparitions reported in 1859 at what is now Champion, Wisconsin, and for older European cults of Notre-Dame du Bon Secours. The canonical Gospels present Mary as a Jewish woman of Galilee, betrothed to the carpenter Joseph, who at Nazareth received the announcement that she would conceive Jesus. They place her at Bethlehem at Jesus’s birth, in Egypt during the family’s flight, at Cana, at the crucifixion, and among the disciples in Jerusalem after the resurrection. No contemporary extra-biblical record fixes her year or place of birth or death. Second-century apocrypha such as the Protoevangelium of James name her parents Joachim and Anne and associate her childhood with Jerusalem, but those claims are not independently confirmed. Christian tradition holds that she remained a virgin and that at the end of her earthly life she was assumed into heaven (the Dormition in the East). From late antiquity she has been venerated as Theotokos and as an intercessor; the epithet of Good Help stresses timely aid to those in distress. Related medieval and early modern European shrines and, in the nineteenth century, congregations such as the Sisters of Bon Secours invoked her under this or closely similar names.

In October 1859 Adele Brise, a Belgian-born immigrant in the frontier settlement of Robinsonville (later Champion) in northeastern Wisconsin, reported three apparitions of a lady in white who called herself the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners. The lady told Adele to gather the children of the wilderness and teach them what they needed for salvation, to pray for conversion, and not to be afraid. Adele thereafter spent her life catechizing scattered settler children, and a chapel was raised on the site. On 8–9 October 1871, during the Peshtigo fire, Adele and neighbors took refuge on the chapel grounds in procession; the surrounding woods and farms were destroyed, but the shrine property and those gathered there were unharmed. The Diocese of Green Bay examined the events over many decades. On 8 December 2010 Bishop David L. Ricken declared the apparitions worthy of belief, the first (and still the only) Marian apparition in the United States to receive such episcopal approval. The site is now the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help. The local feast is kept on 9 October. Under this title Mary is invoked for conversion, for the teaching of the faith to children, and as helper of those in need; she was never the subject of a modern papal canonization process, her cult being of apostolic origin.