Adele Brice. | Credit: National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion
The Catholic Church has officially opened the cause for sainthood of Belgian immigrant Adele Brice, an illiterate woman who had visions of the Blessed Mother.
In a decree by a Wisconsin bishop on Friday, the Catholic Church officially opened the cause for sainthood of a Belgian immigrant who had visions of the Blessed Mother.
Adele Brice (1831–1896) couldn’t read or write, but she traveled the countryside of Wisconsin on foot teaching children and families about God. Brice is most well known for three apparitions she had, which are the only approved Marian apparitions to have happened in the United States.
Last year, more than 200,000 pilgrims visited the shrine to Our Lady of Champion in Wisconsin, Father Anthony Stephens, the Father of Mercy who serves as a rector of the shrine, told EWTN News.
From the time Brice first received holy Communion as a young girl in Belgium, she felt a calling to religious life. But when her family decided to immigrate to the United States, she went with them, trusting her parish priest who encouraged her to go.
She would never become a religious sister, “but she remained faithful to that fundamental calling,” said Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who promulgated the decree on Jan. 30.
“What moves me particularly about her is perseverance,” added Father John Girotti, the vicar general and moderator of the curia for the Diocese of Green Bay. “She moved to this country with her parents when she was in her 20s. She didn’t necessarily want to come, but she came out of respect for her mom and her dad.”
Brice was also blind in one eye because of a childhood injury.
“She had her faith. She loved God. And she persevered,” Girotti continued. “Her faith allowed her to move mountains, as Jesus says. And she did. She did great things. She was open to God’s will in her life.”
In her visions, Mary called her to catechize children, so Brice gave her life to the vocation of education. She wore a habit but was never consecrated as a religious sister. Instead, as a laywoman, she dedicated her life to teaching children the Catholic faith.
“As soon as she experienced the Blessed Virgin Mary speaking to her, her life was transformed and she went immediately away and for the rest of her life [was] teaching children, caring for children, preaching the Gospel without letting up, often with great poverty, with fire, with famine, with poverty, but with enormous faith,” Girotti said. “She kept going. And I think that’s a powerful witness to us today to keep the faith and to share it.”
After building a chapel and a school in the area where Our Lady appeared, the community would experience a night that Stephens described as “like the Battle of Jericho.”
In 1871, as a fire closed in around the property, Brice and others in the community came to pray.
“They just prayed the perimeter of the property where they had a fence set up and the fire burned up to the fence, but it burned around the chapel itself,” Stephens said. “The chapel and the school were spared, and it rained the next morning.”
Stephens called the shrine “a prayerful place.”
Visitors range from devout Catholics to non-Catholics to people who have been away from the Church for a while, and Stephens said he hears lots of “very sincere confessions.”
The shrine has seen “little physical healings” and “moral healings,” Stephens said, including one woman who was cured after 15 years of painful migraines.
An American saint
As the 250th birthday of the United States approaches, Stephens said it is “really exciting for an American to become a Servant of God.”
“Our Catholic identity should form how we live as Americans, and they can very much go together,” Stephens said. “And so this is an exciting thing to have one of our fellow countrymen recognized as one who loved God radically and tried to live heroic virtue. We should try to imitate her so that we can live well as Americans.”
Ricken said he hopes this is part of a move toward uncovering more American saints. He noted that Pope Benedict XVI had urged the Church in the U.S. to begin the process of investigating sainthood causes.
“We knew that there had to be saints here, but we hadn’t, as a Church in the United States, taken the initiative to really take this adventure and go into it,” Ricken said.
The prayerful event announcing her cause drew lots of young families, according to Ricken.
“It was so beautiful to see all the young families here,” Ricken said at a press event after the decree. “I thought that was tremendous, especially since Adele was all about children.”
“[The] Blessed Mother told her to go out to this wild country and teach the children what is necessary for the faith,” Ricken said. “And she’s still doing that, obviously, because it happened tonight where all these young children and families came.”
By Kate Quiñones
This story was originally published by EWTN News on February 2, 2026.
