EWTN News portal reports on the Allex family from Barrington, Illinois, who are participating for the 10th time in the “Walk to Mary” pilgrimage — a 22-mile trek to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Wisconsin, which purports to honor an 1859 apparition to Adele Brise. The article presents this as a model of Catholic family life, emphasizing the children’s enthusiasm, the mother’s emotional consolation, and the family’s desire to “grow closer to Jesus Christ through Mary.” Yet beneath the veneer of pious sentimentality lies a profound doctrinal void, a complete silence on the supernatural realities of the Faith, and a reduction of Catholic spirituality to therapeutic self-help — all hallmarks of the post-conciliar revolution that has gutted the Church of her divine mission.
The Apparition of “Our Lady of Champion”: An Unexamined Foundation
The entire edifice of this pilgrimage rests upon the alleged 1859 apparition to Adele Brise in Champion, Wisconsin — an event the article casually refers to as “the only approved Marian apparition site in the United States.” This claim alone demands scrutiny. The article provides no theological examination of the criteria for authentic private revelations, no discussion of the Church’s rigorous process of discernment, and no acknowledgment that even approved private revelations do not carry the guarantee of infallibility. As the Church has always taught, private revelations — even those approved by competent ecclesiastical authority — belong to a fundamentally different order than public revelation, which closed with the death of the last Apostle. To build an entire devotional culture, let alone a 22-mile pilgrimage tradition, upon such a foundation without this crucial theological context is to risk elevating a private devotion to the level of the Faith itself — a confusion characteristic of post-conciliar piety.
Moreover, the message attributed to the apparition — “gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation” — is presented by Kym Allex as a personal vocation statement for motherhood. While the sentiment of teaching children the Faith is laudable, the article reduces the supernatural message of an alleged apparition to a motivational slogan for homeschooling. Where is the mention of the necessity of baptism for salvation? Where is the teaching on the state of grace, the reality of mortal sin, the absolute necessity of the sacraments — particularly the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and Confession? The message is stripped of its supernatural content and repackaged as a feel-good exhortation to parental diligence. This is precisely the kind of naturalistic reduction that Pius XI warned against in Quas Primas: the tendency to remove Christ and His law from the customs of life, leaving only a vague religiosity devoid of doctrinal substance.
The Language of Therapeutic Catholicism
The vocabulary employed throughout the article is a textbook example of the post-conciliar linguistic revolution — the systematic replacement of precise theological language with the banal terminology of self-help and emotional wellness. Kym Allex describes the Blessed Mother as one who “will wrap me like a swaddling blanket into her mantle and bring me to Jesus.” She speaks of being “lost sometimes in the worry, the anxiety, the stress of life” and finding “consolation” in Marian devotion. She wants her children to become “missionary disciples” and to cultivate “hearts of missionary discipleship.”
Let us be precise about what is happening here. The theological virtue of hope — which orders the soul toward eternal beatitude and the forgiveness of sins through the merits of Christ — has been replaced by emotional “consolation.” The supernatural reality of sanctifying grace, without which no one can be saved, is nowhere mentioned. The Catholic doctrine of prayer of petition — asking the Blessed Virgin to intercede for the conversion of sinners and the salvation of souls — has been reduced to “collecting people’s prayers” in a journal and “wrapping them in our nightly rosary.” The rosary itself, that most powerful of Catholic devotions when properly understood as a meditation on the mysteries of the Faith, becomes a sentimental family ritual rather than a weapon against heresy and sin.
When Allex says, “I might not be preparing them for Harvard. I’m going to prepare them for heaven,” the contrast is revealing — not because the sentiment is wrong, but because the entire framework is naturalistic. Preparing children for heaven means, in Catholic doctrine, ensuring they are baptized, instructed in the catechism, brought to Confession and Holy Communion, taught to avoid mortal sin, and formed in the fear and love of God. It means exposing them to the fullness of Catholic truth, including the hard truths about hell, judgment, and the necessity of penance. None of this appears in the article. Instead, we get walking, biking, prayer journals, and family bonding — all perfectly natural activities dressed in the thinnest veneer of Catholic language.
The Silence on the Most Holy Sacrifice and the Sacraments
Perhaps the most damning omission in this entire article is the complete absence of any reference to the Holy Mass, the sacraments, or the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the true Church. The family walks 22 miles. They pray the rosary. They collect prayer intentions. But where do they attend the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass? Do they seek out priests who offer the traditional Roman Rite — the immemorial liturgy that expresses the Catholic Faith in its fullness and offers the true propitiatory sacrifice? Or do they participate in the Novus Ordo Missae, that fabricated rite of Paul VI which, as even some “traditionalist” theologians have argued, does not clearly express the Catholic theology of the sacrifice and which was crafted in consultation with Protestants?
The article is silent on this point, and that silence is itself an indictment. In the post-conciliar landscape, the distinction between the true Mass and the conciliar “Mass” has become the central question of Catholic life — the articulus stantis et cadentis Ecclesiae. A family that walks 22 miles for Mary but receives “Communion” in the conciliar structures, where the bread of assembly has replaced the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary, is a family that has substituted external devotion for the very source and summit of the Christian life. As Pius XI taught in Quas Primas, Christ’s reign encompasses all of human society, and His royal authority demands that every aspect of life be ordered according to God’s commandments — beginning with the worship He is due.
“Missionary Discipleship” — The Conciliar Mantra
The phrase “missionary discipleship” appears twice in the article, and its presence is a clear marker of post-conciliar provenance. This term, popularized particularly under the Bergoglio pontificate and now perpetuated by Leo XIV, represents a fundamental reorientation of the Church’s mission. The Church’s mission, as defined by Christ Himself, is to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). It is a mission of supernatural conversion — bringing souls from the state of sin to the state of grace, from error to truth, from the dominion of Satan to the Kingdom of God.
“Missionary discipleship,” as used in post-conciliar discourse, typically means something far more naturalistic: engaging in social outreach, building community, “walking with people,” and “being inspired to go and pray with people.” The Allex son who asks a Brazilian man for his prayer intention and then prays for his wife’s healing is presented as a model of this “missionary discipleship.” But where is the call to conversion? Where is the insistence that this man — and his wife — must be in the state of grace, must have recourse to the sacraments, must believe the fullness of Catholic doctrine to be saved? The article presents a Catholicism without demands, without doctrine, without the Cross — a Catholicism of warm feelings and shared walks.
This is precisely the “dogmaless Christianity” that the Holy Office condemned in 1907 under St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu — the reduction of the Faith to a “religious movement” applicable to different times and places (proposition 59), the transformation of the Church into a community subject to continuous evolution (proposition 53), and the treatment of dogmas as mere interpretations of religious facts worked out by the human mind (proposition 22).
The Cult of the Family as Substitute for the Church
The article’s framing of the Allex family as the “Allex tribe” and its emphasis on family tradition, family culture, and family bonding as the primary vehicle of faith formation is another characteristic feature of post-conciliar Catholicism. While the family is indeed the domestic Church and parents have a grave obligation to educate their children in the Faith, the article’s tone suggests that the family unit has become a self-sufficient spiritual ecosystem — a closed circle of mutual encouragement that substitutes for the supernatural life of the Church.
The children “take off of work,” tell their sports coaches they won’t be available, and organize their lives around this annual walk. The family “discerns” together what God is calling them to do. The teenagers are the ones who insist on continuing the tradition. All of this is presented as admirable, but it raises a disturbing question: where is the authority of the Church in this process? Where is the guidance of a true priest, formed in the traditional seminary system, who can provide authentic spiritual direction? Where is the submission to the Magisterium — not the conciliar Magisterium that has contradicted itself at every turn, but the perennial Magisterium of the Church that has consistently taught the same doctrine for two millennia?
The family has become its own magisterium, its own source of spiritual authority, its own arbiter of what constitutes a “pilgrimage of graces.” This is the democratization of the Church that the conciliar revolution has wrought — the replacement of hierarchical authority with communal self-determination, dressed in the language of “discernment” and “synodality.”
The Pilgrimage as Spectacle
Finally, the very nature of this “Walk to Mary” pilgrimage deserves critical examination. The article notes that “thousands of Catholics from around the world have participated” since the first walk in 2013. It is organized with “join in” points along the route, suggesting a highly structured, institutionalized event. The Allex family’s participation has evolved from a two-mile children’s walk to the full 22-mile trek — a progression that mirrors the escalation of devotional intensity characteristic of cult-like phenomena.
The Catholic Church has always recognized the value of authentic pilgrimages — journeys to holy sites, shrines of genuine saints, and places of verified miracles, undertaken with the proper dispositions of faith, hope, and charity, and culminating in the reception of the sacraments. But the modern “pilgrimage” industry, of which the Walk to Mary is a prime example, often bears more resemblance to a spiritual tourism enterprise than to genuine Catholic devotion. The emphasis on physical endurance (“we’ve done 18 miles at Disney, so we can do 22 miles for Mary”), the social dimension (“thousands of Catholics from around the world”), and the emotional payoff (“this walk truly is this pilgrimage of graces”) all point to an experience that is fundamentally naturalistic — a test of physical stamina and family solidarity, blessed with Catholic language but devoid of supernatural content.
Compare this with the authentic Catholic tradition of pilgrimage: the medieval pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, to Rome, to Jerusalem — undertaken as acts of penance, often in reparation for sins, with the explicit intention of visiting the tombs of saints, receiving the sacraments from true priests, and obtaining indulgences for the souls in purgatory. The modern “Walk to Mary” has none of this. It is a walk. It is a family outing. It is a photo opportunity. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a Catholic pilgrimage.
Conclusion: The Emptiness Behind the Enthusiasm
The Allex family’s enthusiasm is genuine, and their desire to raise their children in the Faith is commendable. But good intentions do not substitute for sound doctrine, and emotional fervor is no replacement for supernatural grace. The article presents a Catholicism that has been thoroughly gutted of its supernatural content — a Catholicism of walking and talking, of journals and rosaries, of family bonding and community feeling, but without the Holy Mass, without the sacraments, without the doctrine of salvation, without the reality of sin and judgment, without the authority of the true Church.
This is the Catholicism of the conciliar sect — a Catholicism that Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors when he rejected the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (proposition 80). It is the Catholicism that St. Pius X identified as “the synthesis of all heresies” — Modernism — which reduces the Faith to a subjective religious experience, denies the immutable truth of dogmas, and transforms the Church from a divine institution into a human community evolving with the times.
The Allex family walks 22 miles. But they are walking in the wrong direction — toward a shrine of dubious authenticity, within a conciliar structure that has abandoned the Faith, guided by a language that has emptied Catholic doctrine of its content. What they need is not another walk. What they need is the true Mass, the true sacraments, the true doctrine, and the true Church — the Church that endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, outside the structures of the abomination of desolation that now occupies the Vatican.
Source:
22 miles of faith: Catholic family of 10 turns Walk to Mary pilgrimage into a tradition (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 02.05.2026