The ‘official’ statue of
Our Lady of Good Help

When we were up in Door County last week we decided to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Hope. At this spot in 1859 an immigrant woman from Belgium, Adele Brise, was on her way to a grist mill when she had an apparition of woman.

After another vision, her confessor told her to ask in God’s name who the woman was and what she desires of her. She did and the lady said she was the Queen of Heaven, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and she wanted Adele to teach the catechism, the faith, to local children. Adele gathered some women, founded a secular order of St. Francis. The group of woman opened a boarding school near the site of the apparition.

The school was closed in 1928 but the story of Adele and the apparitions of Mary continued to draw attention and pilgrims. In 2009 the Bishop of Green Bay opened a formal Church investigation in the Marian apparitions that took place in 1859. In 2010 the Bishop gave the official Church approval of the apparitions. This put these appearances of Mary at the same level as those in Fatima, Portugal or Lourdes, France.

In the basement of the chapel, the spot where Mary appeared, there is a beautiful statue of Mary as the Queen of Heaven. Something was not quite right with the statue but I could not quite figure it out until I visited the upstairs chapel. There I saw the ‘official’ statue of Our Lady of Good Hope by Milwaukee Artisan group chosen by the Bishop of Green Bay to the create the sculpture representing Adele’s vision. (See picture on left)

I pride myself in knowing a little about the historical times that Jesus was born, raised, preached and died. His mother Mary was a Semitic Jew. From pictures, a trip to the Middle East and from my own family, Lebanese on my mother’s side, I know Semitic people have a skin color from black to a light brown and have dark or black hair. The official statue was of a young, very white girl with long blond hair. The statue does not take away from the verification of the apparition but calls attention to our own prejudice to picture persons of color appropriately.

I have a devotion to Blessed Mother Mary, the mother of Jesus and Mother of God. She is not, to the best of my knowledge and in my mind, a white woman with long blond hair.

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