The EWTN News portal reports that “Bishop” David Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay led fifty pilgrims from Wisconsin to Belgium from October 10–20, 2026, to venerate the roots of Adele Brice, the alleged visionary of the so-called “Our Lady of Champion,” the only “approved Marian apparition site in the United States.” The itinerary included the tomb of the “canonized” Damien of Molokai, the Catholic University of Leuven where Ricken studied in 1980, and a concelebrated Mass at Brice’s home parish in Dion-le-Val. The article frames this as a “discovering of roots” and a “renewal” for Belgian Catholics, culminating in the presentation of an eight-foot icon depicting the apparition’s message. **This pilgrimage is not a pious act of Catholic devotion but a staged propaganda exercise by the conciliar sect to legitimize a false private revelation and reinforce the usurped hierarchy of the neo-church.**
The Fabrication of a False “Apparition” to Sustain the Neo-Church Narrative
The article uncritically presents the “National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion” as the “only approved Marian apparition site in the United States.” This “approval” derives entirely from the authority of the conciliar sect’s usurpers — specifically the “bishop” of Green Bay in 2010 and the “USCCB” — none of whom possess any canonical jurisdiction. As the theological objections to the Fatima apparitions demonstrate, private revelations, even those “approved” by the counterfeit hierarchy, do not have the guarantee of the Church’s infallibility and often serve to undermine the centralized role of the Church and the sacraments by demanding “hyper-acts” of worship. The Champion apparition follows the same Modernist pattern: it centers on a subjective, emotional experience (“I am the Queen of Heaven… Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation”) rather than the objective depositum fidei entrusted to the true Magisterium. The message’s focus on catechesis and the sign of the cross is a reductive, sentimentalized substitute for the fullness of Catholic doctrine and the Missale Romanum of St. Pius V.
Usurped Authority and the Simulation of Sacred Rites
“Bishop” David Ricken — a man ordained and consecrated in the post-1968 rites of the neo-church, whose orders are at best doubtful and at worst invalid — presided over a concelebrated Mass at St. Martin Parish in Dion-le-Val. Concelebration itself is a liturgical novelty of the 1969 Missal, foreign to the lex orandi of the Roman Rite for over a millennium, and its practice by Ricken alongside “local Belgian priests” of the conciliar sect constitutes a public manifestation of the communio in sacris with the secta conciliaris. The article notes that the parish typically hosts twenty attendees but swelled to 250 for this event. This is not a “renewal” but a Potemkin village of piety, orchestrated by the neo-church’s media apparatus (EWTN/CNA) to manufacture consent for the false apparition and the false hierarchy that promotes it. Ricken’s “anointing service” in the seminary chapel at Leuven — using the post-conciliar rite of the sick, stripped of the traditional Extreme Unction form — is a simulation of a sacrament by a man lacking the potestas ordinis and potestas jurisdictionis of the true Church. Quod ab initio vitiosum est, non potest tractu temporis convalescere (What is vitiated from the beginning cannot be validated by the passage of time).
The Cult of “Servant of God” Adele Brice: A Modernist Canonization Factory
The article reveals that Brice’s “cause for canonization was officially opened in February” by the conciliar authorities. This is the same counterfeit process that produced the “canonizations” of John Paul II, John XXIII, Paul VI, and the “Ulma Family” — all orchestrated by antipopes (John XXIII through Leo XIV) who have ipso facto lost all jurisdiction by manifest heresy, as St. Robert Bellarmine teaches: “A manifest heretic cannot be Pope… he cannot be the head of something of which he is not a member” (De Romano Pontifice). The “Servant of God” title is a bureaucratic label of the neo-church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a dicastery of the abominatio desolationis occupying the Vatican. Brice’s alleged visions in 1859, like the Fatima apparitions of 1917, bear the hallmarks of Jansenist rigorism and subjectivist mysticism rather than Catholic asceticism. The icon presented — eight feet tall, depicting the Virgin with a banner quoting the apparition — is an idol manufactured for the neo-church’s liturgy of man, replacing the Crucifixus and the Regnum Christi with a sentimentalized “Queen of Heaven” who speaks in therapeutic platitudes.
Ethnic Nostalgia Substituting for the Supernatural Faith
Ricken explicitly frames the pilgrimage as a “discovering of roots” for the “Belgian heritage” of Door County, Wisconsin. He states: “They’ve always felt that, but now they actually saw it themselves. They were able to go to her hometown and experience that connection.” This is naturalism masquerading as grace. The article admits Catholicism in Belgium is “at a low point” — a euphemism for the apostasy engineered by the conciliar revolution — yet the pilgrimage is hailed as a success because it evoked ethnic pride and “family connections.” The supernatural end of pilgrimage — adoratio Dei, satisfactio pro peccatis, impetratio gratiarum — is entirely absent. The “reception” after Mass, where “despite having a language barrier, everyone was still able to communicate,” epitomizes the homo religiosus of the Second Vatican Council: horizontal fraternity displacing vertical worship. As Pius XI thundered in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” This pilgrimage builds on sand.
The Leuven Connection: Formation in the Crucible of Modernism
Ricken’s personal highlight was the Catholic University of Leuven, where he “received his graduate degree in sacred theology and completed his seminary formation in 1980.” This university was the epicenter of the nouvelle théologie that poisoned the Council — the domain of Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and the architects of the Constitutio de Sacra Liturgia. That Ricken returns there to lead an “anointing service” in the former seminary chapel is a return to the scene of the crime. The chapel, now stripped of its altar rails and high altar, is a museum of the liturgical revolution. Ricken’s formation there explains his seamless integration into the neo-church’s project: he is a product of the system that replaced Sacra Theologia with anthropology, Lex Orandi with creatio continua, and the Papatus with a collegialist presidency.
Symptomatic of the Great Apostasy: The “Church” as Cultural Heritage Management
The article’s closing quotation from Ricken reveals the neo-church’s true telos: “My hope is that they’ll continue to volunteer and do all the beautiful things they do and have even more commitment to it and be able to identify the work of grace and the Holy Spirit in everything that’s happening today in and around the shrine through Adele [Brice] and through the Blessed Mother.” Note the language: “volunteer,” “commitment,” “identify the work of grace,” “happening today.” This is the vocabulary of activism and immanence, not of sanctitas and transcendentia. The shrine is not a domus Dei et porta caeli but a community center for ethnic identity maintenance. The “Blessed Mother” invoked is not the Deipara of the Symbolum Nicaenum but a projection of the neo-church’s feminist, ecumenist, therapeutic deity. The pilgrimage to Belgium, the land of Damien of Molokai (a true saint canonized by the true Church before the usurpation), is a parasitic exploitation of authentic Catholic glory to legitimize the counterfeit. The neo-church plunders the treasury of Tradition — the true saints, the true shrines, the true universities — to drape its novitates in a borrowed mantle of legitimacy.
Conclusion: No Salvation in the Conciliar Sect’s Inventions
The Wisconsin pilgrimage to Belgium is a microcosm of the post-1958 catastrophe: a false “bishop” leading the faithful of the neo-church to venerate a false “visionary” at the sites of a once-Catholic nation now apostatized, all documented by the propaganda arm of the usurpers (EWTN/CNA). The faithful who participated received no grace from the simulated Mass, no indulgence from the simulated pilgrimage, no intercession from a “Servant of God” created by the counterfeit canonization process. They were fed stones for bread (Mt 7:9). The only true connection to Adele Brice’s Belgium is the Missa Tridentina offered by valid priests in the catacombs of the true Church, the Ecclesia Militans that preserves the integrum depositum fidei without admixture of the novitates of the Concilium Vaticanum Secundum. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — and the conciliar sect is not the Church.
Source:
Wisconsin pilgrims visit Belgium to explore roots of Our Lady of Champion visionary (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 01.11.2026