The Blog

Why is it that we can find countless resources for parents praying for children who have left the faith, but far fewer for children praying for their parents’ return? Although I’m blessed that my own parents are faithful, practicing Catholics, a recent conversation prompted me to reflect on the unique loneliness that often accompanies this sorrowful journey.

A record number of over 10,000 faithful are registered to participate in this tradition of honoring Christ and Our Lady with a 22-mile pilgrimage from the National Shrine of St. Joseph in De Pere, WI, to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion. The Shrine is the only approved Marian apparition site in the United States. We wrote about the apparition’s seer Adele Brice a few months back on this blog—her cause for canonization was recently opened by the Most Reverend David L. Ricken, Bishop of Green Bay. Servant of God Adele Brice devoted her life to traveling on foot as far as fifty miles through the Wisconsin wilderness to catechize families and children regardless of the weather, heeding the instructions to evangelize given to her by Our Lady of Champion.

June 1979: Karol Wojtyła returns for the first time to his home country as Pope John Paul II. He is greeted by millions in Kraków, a city living under a communist regime that kept a tight hold on public religious expression. Tens of millions more hear him on the television and the radio.

The next stages include gathering stories “that have been passed down . . . by Adele or about Adele,” as explained by the Very Reverend John Girotti, Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia for the Diocese of Green Bay, in a press conference. He emphasized the oral tradition as a “very real thing” in Northern Wisconsin, the largest Belgian settlement in the United States. Adele herself could neither read nor write, and the Shrine describes the accounts of her life and visions that have been passed down through generations as a “constant testimony of the Christian faithful since Our Lady’s appearance to Adele.” “From a theological standpoint, a picture will be painted of her life,” said Fr. Girotti. “All of this will help in the discernment, whether we can go to the next step.” 

After a meaningful plot reveal, the film zeroes in on the interiority of Maria’s murderer, who is in the room with us. In light of this revelation, perpetrators, victims, sinners, and saints stand on equal ground, because mercy infuses justice. Despite our discomfort with this evening of scales, grace still does its work. It vitalizes the bleak room of the prison, a place one character likens to Hell.