How Adele Brice’s Life Exemplifies the Value of Catholic Education

Susan Ciancio explains how the example of Servant of God Adele Brice can inspire us to teach the faith to our own children. 

As parents, we know how crucial it is to not just educate our children but to educate them in the faith. If we don’t teach them Catholic values, the secular world surely will not. Thus, we need all the help we can get, and we may soon have another canonized saint — by the name of Adele Brice — helping us along the way.

Who Is Adele Brice?

Adele Brice was a young woman blessed with seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Born in 1831 in Belgium, Adele moved to the Wisconsin area with her family when she was 24 years old. She had always wanted to become a nun, but life and health circumstances prevented this. A lye accident when she was nine blinded her in one eye, and she could neither read nor write.

So she accompanied her family to Wisconsin and began working. One day in the fall of 1859, Mary appeared to Adele as she walked through the woods. Mary told her to pray for sinners and to “gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”

As you can imagine, Adele did not have to hear this directive twice. She understood the gift she had been given, and she set about dutifully teaching the children of the area.

Though she could not read or write, she knew her catechism, and she had a teacher’s heart. There were no schools at the time, so Adele began visiting farms and doing chores for the farmers during the day. At night, she catechized their children. For five years, she spent her days doing this, until her father built both a chapel and a school at the site of the apparition. Soon, kids from throughout the area enrolled in her school.

Adele eventually enlisted other women to help, and they joined the Third Order (Secular) Franciscans. Though they did not take formal religious vows or go through formal religious training, they began calling each other "Sister" and wearing habits to remind them of their mission.

Servant of God

Today, that church and school have become the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion — the only Church-approved Marian apparition site in the US. The graces received and the miracles granted through Adele’s intercession and Our Lady of Champion prompted the staff of the shrine to petition for sainthood for Adele.

Father Tony Stephens, CPM, has been the rector at the shrine since 2024, and he explained the lengthy process that they have gone through up to this point.

He explained that Bishop David Ricken, of the Diocese of Green Bay, first had to talk to his brother bishops about Adele and why he thought she was worthy of sainthood. In May 2024, he received permission to investigate her life of holiness. They then collected evidence for the Dicastery for Causes of Saints in Rome, who approved the petition in October 2025. The dicastery then issued a nihil obstat, meaning that they found that nothing stands in the way of pursuing sainthood.

After that, Bishop Ricken read a decree to parishioners within the diocese. This was done in December 2025, and he asked anyone with information, stories, graces, or miracles concerning Adele to present them to him. Fr. Tony explained that, while there are not people still living who knew her, there are people living whose relatives knew her.

On January 30, the local inquiry was closed and the cause for canonization was opened. At that point, she became Servant of God, which means we can now officially ask for her intercession.

The next step involves the formation of a commission to do the deep dive into her life. A vice postulator in Green Bay will investigate, and his staff will put the information together to send to the postulator in Rome. Then all the information goes to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints to make a final determination.

Father Tony said that many miracles have been attributed to Adele’s intercession over the years and that she is a “simple, humble, faithful woman.” When asked why she deserves to become a saint, he explained, “She received an apparition of Our Lady. ... She was a pious and faithful woman. She was, as far as they know, known to be virtuous. ... She was selfless and very generous. ... Adele had great confidence in God and confidence in Mary’s maternal care.”

Like the other visionaries, Adele was a simple woman with little education. She was probably not someone you would pick as a catechist, yet she made a profound impact.

Her life and her story give us great hope as parents that, if she could teach children, we surely can teach our own! We need only the will and the heart.

The Importance of Education in the Faith

Father Tony explained that “we all need to be fed with that [education in the Catholic faith] because we need those seeds put in our souls so the graces of the Eucharist and confession and our vocations can water that.”

Adele championed catechesis, and it is up to us as parents to follow in her footsteps. Because the apparition of Mary has been approved by the Church, we can be confident in the fact that Mary’s directive to teach the children their catechism is of vital importance. And so we must do the same. That starts at home.

As parents, we must use all the tools at our disposal to teach our children our Catholic faith. That means we read from the Bible, we help them befriend the saints, we have age-appropriate discussions about important topics of today, we utilize programs like the Culture of Life Studies Program to help teach values at home, and we listen to our kids.

Faith is the greatest gift we have been given, and it is our job to get our kids to heaven. We can only do this if we, like Adele Brice, teach them about our Lord. Adele had an enormous impact on the lives of the people in Champion, Wisconsin, and we can use her example to have that impact on our children.

And, praise God, we can now officially pray: Servant of God, Adele Brice, please assist us in teaching our children about God.

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Copyright 2026 Susan Ciancio
Images: The National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion (ChampionShrine.org), all rights reserved; Canva