Wisconsin Marianism and Upper Midwestern Catholic Culture, 1858–2010

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, a cultus that included a shrine and devoted followers developed around the claims of Adèle Brise, a Belgian immigrant, asserting that “Our Lady of Good Help” had appeared to her in Robinsonville in northeastern Wisconsin in the late 1850s. In December 2010, the bishop of Green Bay, David Ricken, pronounced the apparitions to Brise valid, making these the only American apparitions to be officially recognized by the Catholic Church. By contrast, in 1955 the bishop of La Crosse, John P. Treacy, found Mary Ann Van Hoof’s claim of receiving apparitions from “the Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace” in Necedah, central Wisconsin, to be inauthentic, and he prohibited Catholics from worshipping with Van Hoof and her followers. Van Hoof’s claims briefly attracted thousands of Midwestern Catholics seeking mystical experiences of Mary in an American nationalist idiom during the Cold War. The Robinsonville and Necedah apparitions were Upper Midwestern manifestations of a transnational Marian Revival originating in continental Europe after the French Revolution as European Catholics and their diasporas responded to aspects of liberal nationalism and its advocacy of an expansive modern state that undercut clerical authority and parochial communalism.