Our Lady will have a place at the National Eucharistic Congress (NEC) — including under the title Our Lady of Champion.

A new painting showing Our Lady appearing to Belgian immigrant Adele Brise — the Church-approved apparitions involved three appearances of Mary in the Wisconsin woods in 1859 — will be unveiled at the NEC before it is enshrined Aug. 15 at the namesake Marian shrine.

This notable painting will make its main debut in a smaller reproduction at the NEC in Indianapolis. In a way, this national event helped inspire the painting. One of the representatives of the congress was leading an initiative and working with churches and sacred places around the country to commission new sacred art to beautify the spaces of prayer in Indianapolis. After the congress, these new works, the planning dictated, would “go home” to their permanent places in the church or shrine that commissioned them.

When the representative presented the possibility to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, the shrine thought it was “a wonderful idea to create more art surrounding Our Lady of Champion’s apparitions in the United States and to encourage artists to use their God-given talents to bring awareness to Marian devotion in the United States,” said Chelsey Hare, director of communications at the shrine. 

Religious artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs immediately came to mind for the project. The result is a large oil on canvas painting — 60 x 48 inches (5 feet by 4 feet) — that has become the first major painting depicting the apparitions — the first approved Marian appearances in the United States.

“Before beginning this project, I knew nothing about Our Lady of Champion and Adele Brise, and I think that’s true for many Americans. We’re far more likely to have devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lourdes,” Thompson-Briggs told the Register. “But Our Lady has visited our own backyard too, so to speak. It’s a very simple apparition with a very simple message. For Adele, the message carried her personal vocation to a life of catechesis — a call to which she was profoundly faithful. But I think the message is meant for all of us, too.”

 

Beautifully Symbolic

“This painting highlights the Eucharistic element of Our Lady of Champion by uniting the three apparitions to Adele Brise into a single image,” Thompson-Briggs explained.

In her official description, the artist described the meanings within it. “As in each apparition, the Queen of Heaven is depicted robed in dazzling white, standing between two trees, a maple and a hemlock, in the midst of an ancient forest in early October 1859. She appears to dissolve into a cloud of mist, as she did after the second apparition.

“As Adele noticed in the third apparition, a yellow sash surrounds Our Lady’s waist, a crown of stars surrounds her head, and her long wavy golden hair falls over her shoulders. Adele could hardly look at her face because of the bright light shining around her. In the painting, a sheer veil communicates this not-quite-blinding light.

“The right half of Adele’s face, clearly lit to the viewer, reveals what must have most distinguished her in the eyes of the world: the scars from a childhood accident with lye. The left half of her face, with her eye fixed on the Queen of Heaven, is veiled in shadow from the viewer.”

“Adele is dressed in workday clothes, as she was at the time of the first apparition, when she was on her way to the gristmill with a sack of wheat,” the artist continued. “The wheat also alludes to the second and third apparitions, when Adele was on her way to and from the reception of Holy Communion. As during the third apparition, she has fallen to her knees to receive her mission from the Queen of Heaven: ‘Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation ... their catechism, how to sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments.’ Our Lady’s raised right hand at once suggests the mission to gather the children of the country and the blessing she seemed to impart before disappearing. Adele’s acceptance of this mission is symbolized by her embrace of the wheat, which becomes the interpretive key of the painting.” 

She added, “Cultivated in the midst of the wilderness by the children of the country, the wheat is called, like them, to be transformed through the cross and the sacraments — with Adele’s cooperation — into a pure sacrifice to the Lord.”

 

Essential Details

Hare said the shrine connected the artist with the Belgian Heritage Center, which provided Thompson-Briggs with biographical information and photographs that showed the physical features and clothing of the Belgian people at the time of the apparitions, in order to incorporate that into Adele’s depiction.

“This is also one of the first artistic depictions of Adele facing the viewer,” Hare explained. She described how other artistic renditions of the apparitions present “Our Lady with Adele’s back facing towards her to present the focus on the Blessed Mother, rightfully so. We get to see Adele’s face in this image,” she emphasized. “Gwyneth showcases a front-facing view of Adele. She really tried to give a sense of dignity to the reality of Adele’s scars over her eye due to an accident with lye at a young age. This shows us all that, despite our limitations, despite our appearance, despite our education, Our Lady chooses the humble and the ‘little’ to bring about the glory of God.”

“Her response to Our Lady’s message is for us to model too,” Hare added.

 

Eucharistic Elements

Thompson-Briggs said she was struck especially by the Eucharistic elements in the apparition “and wanted to highlight those in light of the National Eucharistic Revival.”

She emphasized how “Our Lady praises Adele for having received Holy Communion but tells her to do more — to make a general confession in order to receive Communion better and to offer the graces of her Communion for the conversion of sinners threatened with divine punishment.”

Then Our Lady asks Adele to teach children the rudiments of faith and how to approach the sacraments. “If the Eucharistic Revival is successful, it needs to do likewise, not only strengthening faith in the Eucharist, but also strengthening our wills to prepare well to receive Our Eucharistic Lord, especially through the sacrament of penance with thorough examinations of conscience, sincerer contrition for sin, and firmer commitments to sin no more,” the artists underscored.

 

Journey to Indianapolis

When those traversing the northern Marian Route stopped in Champion on June 16 on their National Eucharistic Pilgrimage — Our Lady of Champion is the official patroness of this northern Marian Route — Hare said these pilgrims told the shrine that “they were praying for an image of Our Lady to carry with them and bring to Indianapolis. Then the shrine surprised them with this image.” She called it “a nice little God moment.”

The shrine also handed out small prayer cards with the art on the front and the artist’s description on the back to the 2,000 participants in the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage Mass and procession there. “Everyone we gave it to had such a positive emotional reaction to seeing the sacred art,” Hare said.

It represented the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage visiting Champion, encountering Our Lady of Champion and her message for all of us, and then “taking her with them for the rest of the pilgrimage, bringing Our Lady of Champion to Indianapolis,” Hare noted. The smaller canvas reproduction, made by the shrine for the Eucharistic Congress, is now accompanying the pilgrims in their Eucharistic Pilgrimage van, where they are traveling with Jesus when they are not on pilgrimage by foot. 

 

Local Canonization Cause

Quite providentially, on June 14, Bishop David Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay, who declared the apparitions authentic in 2010, presented the life of Adele Brise at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ gathering, asking them to affirm moving forward with the opening on the local level her cause for beatification and canonization. The bishops voted unanimously to do so. Hare calls it “divine timing that Gwyneth’s image is bringing Adele into the picture as well.”

Our Lady’s Art for Everyone

The copy of this new interpretation of Our Lady of Champion will be on display at the shrine’s booth that will be located inside the Expo Hall, #1231. Present plans list the painting will be displayed in the area leading into the confessionals, the 500 ballroom. 

(No. 1231) at Lucas Oil Stadium during the congress. The shrine will also be handing out the artwork on prayer cards with either the artist’s description or the official National Eucharistic Revival prayer.

After the congress, the shrine will have larger prints for sale in its gift shop. Thompson-Briggs will also make archival giclee art prints on request through her website, GwynethThompsonBriggs.com.

Looking ahead, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion has a notable event schedule for the Solemnity of the Assumption. By then, it will be placed on permanent display.

“The shrine plans to display the original art in its large gathering space, Mother of Mercy Hall, for pilgrims to experience and pray with,” Hare told the Register. “We also plan to place a smaller reproduction of the art in the Apparition Oratory.”

Hare said the shrine is grateful that Thompson-Briggs “shared her God-given talents with the shrine to offer a beautiful view of Adele’s encounter with Our Lady of Champion.”

The artist herself shared her hopes for this painting. “Perhaps there is something providential about the increased diffusion of the story of Our Lady of Champion at the time of our National Eucharistic Revival,” she said. “I hope the painting can help others to visualize the apparition and its call to a Eucharistic life and encourage them to respond as faithfully as Adele to Our Lady’s message.”