Adele Brise was a twenty-eight-year-old Belgian immigrant living with her family near the settlement of Robinsonville (later renamed Champion), north of Green Bay in northeastern Wisconsin — dense forest country settled mostly by recent Walloons. In early October 1859, on her way to the grist mill, she saw a luminous woman in white standing between a maple and a hemlock tree at a spot she had passed many times. The figure was silent. Adele told her parish priest, who advised her to ask: 'In God's name, who are you, and what do you want of me?'
A few days later, on Sunday 9 October 1859, walking with her sister and a friend to Mass at Bay Settlement eleven miles to the north, Adele saw the woman a second time; returning from Mass she saw her a third time, and this time asked. The reply, in French: 'I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners; and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning, and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession, and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners. If they do not convert and do penance, my Son will be obliged to punish them.'
Asked what she should do, Adele was told: 'Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation. Teach them their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments.' Adele wept that she did not know how to teach; the Lady answered: 'Go and fear nothing. I will help you.' Adele spent the rest of her life — until her death in 1896 — walking the farms of the peninsula in all weathers as a catechist, gathering children at remote farms, and founding a school and a community of tertiaries at the site.
On 8 October 1871 — twelve years almost to the day — the Peshtigo fire, the deadliest in American history and far larger than the Chicago fire of the same night, swept through the Wisconsin forests and killed an estimated 1,200 to 2,400 people. The people of the settlement gathered at the chapel and processed all night around the grounds with the statue of Our Lady. In the morning every tree, fence and building around the five-acre shrine property was burned to ash, and the land inside the fence was untouched.
After a two-year commission, Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay declared on 8 December 2010 that the events, apparitions and locutions given to Adele Brise in October 1859 'do exhibit the substance of supernatural character' and approved them as worthy of belief — the first and only formal episcopal approval of a Marian apparition in the United States. In April 2023 the Holy See's Dicastery for Divine Worship granted the shrine an annual solemnity on 9 October, and it took the name National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion.