How we started
About 2013, a group of students from Communion and Liberation University (CLU, the university section of CL) began an annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Champion, then known as Our Lady of Good Help.
It was primarily for university students who were about to graduate, so they could entrust this important step into adult life to Our Lady. It was inspired by the pilgrimage that CL has organized for decades for university students in Italy to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland.
It has taken place every year since 2013, including a small biking one in 2020. Over the years, the pilgrimage to Champion has expanded to include people of all ages.
Where we are now
The pilgrimage now is organized by a couple of friends (Brian, Claire, Francesco, Grace, Paolo, Fr. Pietro, and Suker) who have become friends over the years through the pilgrimage and whose lives have been changed by Our Lady. It is completely self-funded and self organized.
Questions? Wanna join or help out (we can definitely use help with the website)? Contact us below!
Our Lady of Champion
Our Lady of Champion is a little-known place among American Catholics, despite being the site of the only approved Marian apparition in the United States. The shrine was established at the site where Our Lady appeared to a young woman named Adele Brice, who immigrated to Wisconsin from Belgium in the mid-1800s. Mary asked Adele to provide education and catechesis for the children of the farming families in the area, a mission that Adele carried out for the rest of her life by founding schools, traveling throughout the region to teach, and later opening a religious community for women.
The shrine is also recognized as a place of miracles, including the first great miracle associated with it: just a few years after the apparition, during the great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, which devastated that region of Wisconsin, all the farmers who sought refuge there were saved through Mary’s intercession.
*The pilgrimage is not officially associated with the Shrine
**Image is from the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion website