In 2019, Bishop David Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay wanted to establish a Medical Association for the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Wisconsin, the only Church-approved Marian apparition site in the United States.
The purpose was, similar to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France, to investigate testimonials of potential miracles associated with Champion from over the years.
Enter Joe Sanders, a knight in the Order of Malta and a parishioner at St. Philip the Apostle Church in Pasadena.
So how did a Catholic living in Southern California end up helping lead investigations into miraculous healing at a national shrine in Wisconsin?
It can be traced to the Order of Malta’s annual pilgrimage to Champion, where members and special guests from Southern California returned in August.
“It’s just been a labor of love for me, not being a medical doctor, but loving the Church, loving the shrine, try[ing] to publicize the shrine, bring[ing] people there as a place of healing,” Sanders said.
The history of Our Lady of Champion
In 1859, a 28-year-old Belgian immigrant woman named Adele Brice, also spelled Brise, experienced three separate incidents in the rural area of what is now Champion, Wisconsin, seeing a blonde woman in white standing between two trees, wearing a gold sash and a crown of stars. After confiding in a priest after one of the visions, she was told to approach the woman in the name of God and ask what she wanted.
Upon walking back home from church, Brice saw the woman in the same spot again and asked the question.
The woman revealed that she was the Virgin Mary and told Brice to pray for the conversion of sinners and to teach the children about the Catholic faith and their sacraments.
The Virgin Mary’s final words to Brice were: “Go and fear nothing, I will help you.”
Brice’s father built a small chapel at the site of the apparitions and word spread about the visions, especially in the Belgian immigrant community.
Twelve years later, the Peshtigo Fire swept through the area, burning more than a million acres and killing more than 2,000 people, the deadliest fire in U.S. history. Those near the chapel took refuge at the site, where Brice led the people in praying the rosary and leading a procession through the grounds, even as heavy smoke surrounded them.
Shortly afterward, it began to rain, sparing everything within the site’s bordering fence, including the chapel and school.
While locals had a deep devotion at the site, it wasn’t until 2010 that Ricken investigated Brice’s visions and determined them as “worthy of belief,” making the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, as it was known then, the only Church-approved Marian apparition site in the U.S.
The U.S. bishops made the site a national shrine in 2016 and the Vatican gave its approval in 2022. The shrine’s name was changed to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion.
On Jan. 30, 2026, 130 years after her death, the Diocese of Green Bay opened a sainthood cause for Brice, who is buried at the shrine, formally declaring her a “servant of God.”
Investigating potential miracles
The apparitions in Champion occurred only a year after the appearances by the Virgin Mary in Lourdes. Devotion in France spread quickly, as did the need to investigate reports of healings. But in Champion, that wasn’t the case.
Although he’s not a doctor, Sanders knew plenty of them through the Order of Malta, some of whom were already helping investigate healings in places like Lourdes. The first step was organizing and digitizing the boxes of old records and testimonies associated with Brice or the shrine, and setting up a database.
Now his team meets every August during the Champion pilgrimage to discuss cases and how to proceed. But he cautions the process is still in its infancy.
“We’re nothing on the order of magnitude of Lourdes,” Sanders said. “You have to take baby steps, and so we’ve been doing that, and it’s been a wonderful experience.”
Sanders said they use the Lambertini Criteria established by the Catholic Church in the 1730s to determine whether an unexplained cure was miraculous. The criteria break down like this:
- The disease must be serious and impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to cure by human means
- The disease must not be in a stage at which it is liable to disappear shortly by itself
- The cure must be instantaneous or immediate
- The cure must be complete (no partial healing)
- The cure must be permanent (with no return of the ailment)
Sanders and his team whittled down the 200 or so cases they inherited to about five that warranted further scrutiny.
In one particular case, for the first time, the team will assign a doctor “champion” to do a deep-dive, meeting with the person to better determine whether the healing might have been miraculous.
Sanders believes it’s still important to research these cases in Champion, even after Brice’s Marian apparitions have been endorsed.
“I think it’s just man’s desire to confirm over time that this is sacred ground and that Mary did appear here, and that she’s still present here to her people,” Sanders said. “So if it can be documented so that more people become aware of it and want to travel there and seek healing, then so much the better.”
A miracle to be in Champion
Speaking of miracles, Stephanie McKenny should be dead.
On May 20, 2025, shortly after returning from a pilgrimage to Lourdes with the Order of Malta, McKenny was in a horrific accident after another vehicle T-boned her car, sending it rolling over four times.
When the car settled, McKenny got out of the car unscathed. She had not a scratch or a bruise. She had no injuries or pain. Every X-ray, every CAT scan, every MRI came out normal.
When McKenny returned home, a friend whom she described as “mystical” told her that Our Lady of Lourdes appeared to her and said she had protected her.
“I burst out sobbing,” said McKenny, an LAPD police psychologist who retired in 2024. “Now it makes sense. I know I must be living on borrowed time. There must be a reason why she's intervened for my life, and then there must be work for me to do that she wants me to do. So I’m going to always answer that call.”
The Blessed Mother’s call came quickly, and seemingly all at once.
In late April, McKenny went to the Order of Malta’s Lourdes pilgrimage, as she had for the past five years as part of the medical team. Then in June, she visited the Knock Shrine in Ireland. Finally, she attended Champion for the first time in August.
Three Marian pilgrimages in five months.
“I was born on the feast of the Assumption, so I’ve always felt a special connection,” McKenny said. “I always thought, well, there must be a reason I was born on this day and not some other day.
“I would never say no to her. That’s how serious and devoted I am.”
Early on in the Champion pilgrimage, one person confided in her that they had a family member who was killed in a mass murder and was struggling to forgive. Another had an identical twin who committed suicide. A third person wondered about moving on following their mother’s death anniversary.
“I kind of chuckle each time, and I say to the person, ‘Do you realize you’re speaking to the only psychologist in Champion right now?’ ” McKenny said.
“A good mother is going to help her sons and daughters when they’re hurting. She’s going to get them whatever help that they need. So sometimes [Our Lady] sends people my way that maybe I can be helpful to.”
Champion pilgrimage experiences
If anyone could appreciate the special nature of the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, it’s Mary Jo McCarthy. Having grown up in nearby Green Bay, she went on a field trip to the shrine in eighth grade and had heard personal healing stories from family members.
“It’s a bit more personal for me, I guess,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy, now living in Menlo Park in Northern California, has been attending the annual Champion pilgrimage since 2019, and was the co-chair for planning this year’s trip. Going back every year has given her an admiration for Brice and the other Belgian immigrants who kept their faith.
“The difference when I’m at Our Lady of Champion is that it’s so reflective,” McCarthy said. “I remember just standing there and trying to visualize myself back in the 1800s and what she must have felt like.
“And so when I go back every year, my favorite thing to do is to just go out there and look at the cornfields or wherever it is, because for me it helps me feel Mary’s presence.”
Other guests had their stories of graces received at the shrine.
Toni Calderon, an Eagle Rock resident who’s a parishioner at St. Bede Church in La Cañada Flintridge, has a daughter, Katy, who’s been in the Order of Malta since 2019.
She went to the Champion pilgrimage last year for the first time, but this year had an even more profound experience: while praying and looking at the Blessed Sacrament during Eucharistic adoration and benediction, she clearly heard a voice calling, “Mama, mama.”
“That voice was exactly like my son’s voice,” Calderon said about her son, Louie, who died two years ago. “It was a gift from God to hear my son’s voice again. It was the most wonderful blessing for me.”
As Jessica Castillo sat on the airplane, flying back from the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Champion, full of joy and gratitude, she wondered to herself: How did I get here?
The answer, strangely enough, was at the funeral Mass for Bishop David O’Connell, who died in 2023. She sat in the cathedral pews, marveling at the Order of Malta dames and knights who were in attendance.
A couple of years later, at her job as communications coordinator at St. Phillip the Apostle Church in Pasadena, she crossed paths with Sanders and his wife, Ann, who are also parishioners at the parish. Shortly before the Order of Malta’s annual trip to Champion in August, Ann Sanders — who’s also the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ liaison for Healthcare Ministry — said they wanted to sponsor Castillo to attend the pilgrimage.
As the oldest of three children and struggling to care for her parents and grandparents, it was providential on the Champion pilgrimage to hear a talk about growing in holiness with aging relatives.
“Just seeing it in a different perspective,” Castillo said. “And then when I got back home, I called up my siblings, and I was like, ‘Yo, we gotta treat our parents and grandparents with a little more patience, with a little more love.’ ”
Castillo came away from the Champion pilgrimage with a newfound appreciation for the shrine, and believes more people need to lean on the Blessed Mother.
“This is our Guadalupe, this is our Fátima, this is our Lourdes,” Castillo said. “She’s waiting for us to ask for her intercession and ask for her companionship, especially us living here in the United States.”
‘Why did Mary choose this place?’
Despite being an approved Marian apparition site, Champion is not as prominent as Guadalupe, Lourdes, or Fátima. But the Order of Malta is hoping to change that, or at least to shine a bigger spotlight on it.
Sanders said that after Brice’s sainthood cause was opened earlier this year, more than 130 new testimonials have poured in, giving him and the Medical Association even more cases to look through.
“It is just an effort to see what’s going on here at this special place out in the countryside, outside of Green Bay,” he said. “What’s happening here? What has happened over the years? Why did Mary choose this place to appear to Adele Brice?
“Really, whether we can prove them out or not is not the point. The point is that they occurred through the intercession of Mary and with her Son, Jesus Christ, and these people have had healings.”
