OUR LADY OF GOOD HELP IS THE IDEAL PATRONESS FOR PARENTS WHO ARE EDUCATING THEIR CHILDREN AT HOME

One day in 1859, in the wild woods of Wisconsin, a young woman called Adele Brise was walking along a path in the forest when suddenly there was an apparition of an extraordinarily beautiful lady. An immense bright light surrounded the lady and she was dressed in white with a gold sash around her waist and she stood between a dark green fir tree and the pointy leaves of a maple tree.  The lady had thick fair locks that fell around her shoulder and a perfect oval face.    

Adele was stunned by the lady's great beauty, but she couldn’t fathom who the lady might be. When she reached home she asked her family and they suggested that it might be a soul in Purgatory in need of prayer. Her family were pious Belgian Catholics and they had brought their faith traditions with them to America, where they were making a new home in the uncultivated wilderness, a veritable jungle of trees. Adele had not wanted to up sticks and move to America, she had wanted to become a nun in the Foreign Missions, and when her parents asked her to cross the Atlantic with them, she had been thrown into quite a quandary. Her priest had counselled her to emigrate with them, and assured her that if t'was God's will then she would become a nun in America. As you will see, his words would be prophetic. At the time of the first apparition, however, Adele was a farm girl who was blind in one eye and not especially learned. 

A little while later, Adele was walking along the same earthen path when for the second time she saw the beautiful lady, and was astonished. As was Adele's way, she sought out a priest for counsel, and he instructed her that were the lady to appear again, she should find out the reason she was appearing. Sunday rolled around, and Adele and two friends were returning from Holy Mass when Adele was met with an apparition of the beautiful lady again. This time Adele summoned the nerve to ask, "In God's Name who are you and what do you want of me?" She received the humbling answer, "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 repent my Son will be obliged to punish them." Adele's friends could not see Our Lady, but yet they believed and knelt in her honour. Our Lady looked lovingly at them and said, "Blessed are they who believe without seeing." Our Lady then gave Adele a precise mission, "Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation." Adele was commanded to teach the children, "their catechism, how to sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross and how to approach the Sacraments."

News of Our Lady’s apparitions spread among the humble community of settlers and great support was given young Adele. Her father built a wooden chapel, the size of a shed on the site of the apparitions and it was called Our Lady of Good Help.  Adele took to her role with zealous passion. She went from door to door, and asked the parents if she could do all their household chores if they would let her teach their children the Faith. They readily agreed. Adele was their drudge and in exchange they let her be their children’s catechist.  Adele may be the ideal intercessor for parents striving to catechise their children first in the home. If you are a homeschooling parent, imagine your joy if an amiable young woman helped you and your friends as Adele helped her neighbours.

In time, Adele founded a little school, so she could teach more children at once. The school was established on one firm premise that the young be given the one, true Faith there. When other women came to work with Adele as teachers, they were led to form a community of sisters. For this reason, I suggest Adele may also be an intercessor for teachers and parents trying to found from scratch a new Catholic school system.

  

Adele Brise

Our Lady of Good Help ought to be a patroness of home-schooling and of newly minted Catholic schools which are founded with the noble aim of forming the children in the Faith above all else. After Our Lady of Good Help gave Adele her mandate, a core group of children were given solid instruction in the Faith in the comfort of their homes, and as Adele helped them, she may help you from her heavenly home to instruct your children in the Faith.  I proffer Adele as an intercessor and Our Lady of Good Help as a patroness. And we may pray to Our Lady of Good Help for the many, many people who are new to homeschooling. Never before was the mission given Adele of greater relevance to multitudes the world over. In the wake of Covid 19 many, many people had to homeschool their children and kitchens and living rooms all over the globe became classrooms when schools and universities closed. As the comic Conan O'Brien quipped on Twitter, "Lori Loughlin is wondering how the Corona Virus got into Princeton and her kid didn't."  

If I may indulge a prediction, I believe many parents are discovering the benefits of home-schooling and will not be such good automatons as to send their children back to the institutes of indoctrination when the time comes. I myself used to be unfairly prejudiced against home-schooling. But after I tended the psychological wounds I carried from my time in primary school, in a spirit of honesty I acknowledged the dire flaws in state-run institutions of indoctrination, and I accepted that the damage done to children in these settings is not made good by the education they receive. I see a lot of my young peers go through the same process as I did, and then deciding to home-school their own children because they cannot in good conscience put their children through the same system that damaged them.

Traditional Catholics have been stalwarts of home-schooling, and now their ranks are swelled by masses from different walks of life, who may not share the Faith with us as of now, but who for starters will be like-minded as regards home-schooling. We need to pray to Our Lady of Good Help for these parents. May they have an Adele come into their lives. 

I wrote this column for The Mass of Ages, Summer 2020 edition. You may read the entire magazine here.