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Posted on 03/05/2026 6:14:47 AM PST by Antoninus
The National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion (originally known as Our Lady of Good Help), is the only formally approved Marian apparition site in the United States. Considering the site is near Green Bay, Wisconsin, I had at one time, in my profound ignorance, assumed that it must have something to do with the Packers various Super Bowl victories. But no. The site has nothing to do with Vince Lombardi, Brett Farve, or Aaron Rogers. It is much more closely associated with Our Lady, Star of the Sea, than Bart Starr.
My general lack of knowledge about this shrine has been remedied to a reasonable degree by reading the novel The Woman in the Trees by Theoni Bell. This relatively recent work arrived among a box of books from TAN slated for our parish bookrack. I snatched it up immediately, suspecting that it would make for good Lenten reading. I was not disappointed.
The Woman in the Trees sets out to tell the origin story of the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion through the eyes of a fictional immigrant girl from Belgium, Slainie Lafont. The story of the Shrine is told from an oblique angle which adds an enticing touch of mystery to the factual elements of the tale. Servant of God Adele Brice, the recipient of our Lady's apparition in 1859, is not one of the central characters of the book. Instead she flits in and out of the story like a guardian angel, arriving when she is most needed. Her impact on the main characters however, particularly Slainie and her irascible and immovably stubborn mother, is profound.
As a visionary, Adele does not follow the archetype set by the simple radiant beauty of Saint Bernadette. Nor does she appear like one of the wide-eyed innocents who received the locutions of Our Lady of Fatima. On the contrary, Adele had suffered a particularly horrible facial injury as a child which left her scarred and missing an eye. Yet despite her potentially frightening appearance, Adele persevered in the mission given to her by Our Lady to "gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation."
This novel is of that type of historical fiction that I enjoy the most in that it creates memorable characters and weaves them in, around, and through the history without making them a Pollyanna or secret genius without whom the defining events could not have happened. The novel entertains and informs at the same time. Best of all, it brings the history to life and makes the reader want to learn more about that newly settled woodland region of Wisconsin in the mid-19th century in general, and the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in particular. Among the historical events that impact the story are the immigration of Walloons from Belgium to Wisconsin, the American Civil War, and most especially, the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871.
If you've never heard of the Peshtigo Fire, you're not alone. Strangely enough, it happened on the same day—October 8, 1871—as the better remembered Great Chicago Fire. But as horrible as the Chicago fire may have been, the great Peshtigo Fire was much worse. In the space of 24 hours, the firestorm scorched an area of about 1.2 million acres of forest and farmland in eastern Wisconsin. The burn zone included several towns, and the fire moved so quickly, that thousands of people were unable to flee in time. The death toll was never fully determined. It was estimated that somewhere around 2,000 people were killed.
In the middle of the burn zone was the small shrine of Our Lady of Good Help and a few surrounding buildings. The shrine chapel itself was a small wooden structure which had been set up by the family of Servant of God Adele Brice at the spot where Our Lady had appeared to Adele as a young girl twelve years before. During the intervening years, as Adele's apostolate flourished, a convent and school building were added nearby the chapel.
19th century engraving from Harper's Weekly showing the devastation wrought by the fire. As the firestorm approached on October 8, many people from the surrounding farms and villages fled to the chapel. Led by Sister Adele, they prayed the Rosary, sang hymns, and processed around the chapel with the image of the Blessed Virgin before them. The great firestorm raged all around them. It burned the outside of the fence surrounding the shrine buildings—but proceeded no further.
Early the next morning, a soaking downpour doused the fire.
When the smoke finally cleared, the area around the shrine was a scene of apocalyptic destruction. An eyewitness who very nearly lost his life in the fire, Father Peter Pernin, described the what he saw in Peshtigo when he returned three days after the fire:
About one o'clock in the afternoon, a car was leaving for Peshtigo, conveying thither men who went daily there for the purpose of seeking out and burying the dead. I took my place with them. The locomotives belonging to the Company, having been burned, were now replaced by horses, and we progressed thus till we came up with the track of the fire. We walked the rest of the way, a distance of half a league, and this gave me ample opportunity for examining thoroughly the devastation and ruin wrought, both by fire and by wind. Alas, as much as I had heard on the sad subject, I was still unprepared for the melancholy spectacle that met my gaze.Given the totality of the destruction, the fact that the shrine of Our Lady of Good Help survived intact has been considered by many to be a miraculous sign of God's mercy.lt is a painful thing to have to speak of scenes which we feel convinced no pen could fully describe nor words do justice to. It was on the eleventh of October, Wednesday afternoon, that I revisited for the first time the site of what had once been the town of Peshtigo.
Of the houses, trees, fences that I had looked on three days ago nothing whatever remained save a few blackened posts still standing, as if to attest the impetuous fury of the fiery element that had thus destroyed all before it. Wherever the foot chanced to fall it rested on ashes. The iron tracks of the railroad had been twisted and curved into all sorts of shapes, whilst the wood which had supported them no longer existed. The trunks of mighty trees had been reduced to mere cinders, the blackened hearts alone remaining. All around these trunks, I perceived a number of holes running downwards deep in the earth. They were the sockets where the roots had lately been. I plunged my cane into one of them, thinking what must the violence of that fire have been, which ravaged not only the surface of the earth, but penetrated so deeply into its bosom.
Then I turned my wondering gaze in the direction where the town had lately stood, but nothing remained to point out its site except the boilers of the two locomotives, the iron of the wagon wheels, and the brick and stonework of the factory. All the rest was a desert the desolation of which was sufficient to draw tears from the eyes of the spectator—a desert recalling a field of battle after a sanguinary conflict. Charred carcasses of horses, cows, oxen, and other animals lay scattered here and there. The bodies of the human victims—men, women, and children—had been already collected and decently interred, their number being easily ascertained by counting the rows of freshly-made graves. ("The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 1971)
The entirety of Fr. Pernin's account may be found at the link above and is well worth a read.
Also well worth reading is The Woman in the Trees. I highly recommend the novel for young readers of age 11 or 12 and older. It makes for a quick, easy, and satisfying read for adults as well—an ideal book to read aloud with your kids.
Click here to find out more about the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion.
Click here to learn about Adele Brice's cause for canonization.
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Catholic ping!
Ping to Diana in Wisconsin regarding the Great Peshtigo Fire.
Thanks for posting this.
This is a nice bit of Great Lakes cultural history. Thank you for posting!
My Great Grandfather’s first wife is buried in the Peshtigo Cemetary. We visited once with my Grandfather and Dad. So many gravestones listed “Perished” instead of “Died”…indicating a fire victim. The mass graves were sad as well.
What a massive catastrophe!
Ping
The wind was so strong that day, the fire jumped over the Green Bay and picked up again in Door County. Vert hot, intense fire storm whipped up by the wind.
Its “just around the corner” from me. A person would think that it would draw more traffic than it does.
There were a number that day leading to a theory that it was from a fragmented meteor. There was one that went around this shrine north east of Green Bay and up towards Door county. Somewhere along the line I read about one in Michigan and I think the another smaller one in Indiana(?).
There popular story about the Peshtigo fire being caused by environmental damage in the local forest. Obviously some dry logging waste in Wisconsin isnt going to cause fires all these other places too.
Bookmark
It was windy across the Great Lakes region that day. There were fires elsewhere. I think there was a big one on Lake Erie. It had been a dry summer. Wisconsin was a big logging state at the time, and around Peshtigo there was a lot of deadwood and sawdust laying around which contributed to the conflagration.
My grandparents on my dads side went through and survived that fire.
The stories...
Small towns became legendary..they ceased to exist.
Entire families were never indentied.
Hell of a lot more than claimed killed were killed.
Those stories were factual.
The farmers, and other entities were constantly clearing and buring slash.
The smoke was constant. That is why nobody paid any attention to it untill it was late.
Grandmother always explained that.
It was so dry that grt gramps had to haul water into the crews laying logging spurs for winter logging IN THE SWAMPS.
Many people died from the cold water in the Peshtigo river out on the mill pond. Those near shore, were fried...broiled.
You want to know what that sounded like?
Grandmom said if you go to Niagara falls and listen, thats what it sounded like except, you’d have to imagine some crackling with it.
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