Do You Fear the Call to Catechize?

Nearly 170 years ago in Champion, Wisconsin—a few hours northeast of the Youth Guild’s home of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe—a Belgian immigrant named Adele Brice stood before a maple and a hemlock. Between those trees, she beheld a figure.

Adele thought the woman might have been a soul in purgatory, but a crown of stars appeared above her head. Her white dress and golden hair glittered in the autumn sun, and Adele, perplexed by her presence, ignored her and moved on.

Walking the ten miles to Mass days later, the woman once again paid Adele a visit between the trees. Adele’s priest told her to ask her name if she saw her again. On the third visit, Adele was overcome by the figure’s radiant presence, but none of her companions could see what she was seeing.

In God’s name, Adele demanded, falling to her knees, who are you and what do you want of me?

I am the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same.

Mary made her purpose in the woods clear. She was calling Adele to catechize children far and wide across the frontier region she called home. When Adele asked her how she could possibly do so—herself illiterate, blind in one eye, and living in a remote region—Mary exhorted her with specifics:

Teach them their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do.

Then, Mary gave Adele the maternal reassurance that echoed Scripture itself:

Go and fear nothing, I will help you.

Adele went. She walked countless miles, up to 50 in one day, and did chores and farm work for the families she visited in exchange for the opportunity to teach the faith to their children. She and her family erected a chapel and shrine on the site of the apparition.

In 1871, the most devastating fire in American history ravaged northeastern Wisconsin. The families that Adele and her peers had educated fled to the shrine and processed around the grounds, praying the rosary to Mary under her title of Our Lady of Good Help. Although the entire area surrounding the chapel and shrine was destroyed, the chapel that stood in the place of Mary’s apparition was spared.

Adele Brice—whose cause for canonization was opened in 2025—is an example for all faithful for many reasons. But today, we are focusing on one aspect of this woman and her apparition: the call to catechize and dispelling the fear of what that might mean.

Our Call to Catechize

The Catechism of the Catholic Church delineates family roles explicitly and places the responsibility of faith formation squarely on a child’s parents, referring to the home as “the natural environment for initiating a human being into solidarity and communal responsibilities” (CCC, 2224). Not one of many good environments, but the environment.

This privilege and responsibility is granted through the grace of marriage, a result of the love found, nurtured, and lived therein. The catechism begins this topic with a beautiful statement that shows the true foundation of such an education—love and respect of human dignity.

“Parents must regard their children as children of God and respect them as human persons. Showing themselves obedient to the will of the Father in heaven, they educate their children to fulfill God’s law.” (CCC, 2222)

Going on, the Church teaches that the precondition for this education is to build a household in which “tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. . . . This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery—the preconditions of all true freedom” (CCC, 2223).

True freedom—what more could we want for our children?

You may be thinking, like Adele Brice, that you do not know how to educate a child in the faith. With a history and heart so vast as that of our faith, it is safe to say that all parents have approached this task being daunted, or perhaps dreading what is to come. While we may not relate to Adele’s illiteracy or remote dwelling, all the information at our fingertips makes no difference if we are, above all, afraid to take action in our children’s spiritual lives.

Mary’s words to Adele encourage us to act. She tells us to go—but not to the library, to our priests, or even to our Bibles. The first place we are to go to is the children. We show up first, and we do not give into our fear. As promised, we will find help along the way.

Ready or Not?

We may imagine that in order to hand on our faith to our children effectively and fulfill our responsibilities to the Lord, we must master everything ourselves—we must be an encyclopedia of Scripture, doctrine, and child-friendly answers to heady, complicated questions on the Trinity and transubstantiation. While a hunger to learn more about our faith is both fruitful and virtuous, our call to catechize does not hinge upon encyclopedic knowledge. In some sense, it does not hinge upon any amount of knowledge at all.

We are ready when we decide that we want our children to know and love Jesus Christ. Who among us cannot say that we desire such a thing?

When we accept the idea that we can learn alongside our children—a scene the Lord delights in—we can set aside our fear of being wrong and come to a new understanding of our authority in our children’s spiritual lives. This authority is one that encourages, uplifts, and praises their relationship to God, and is established by our example of prioritizing our own relationship to Him.

If we are afraid of being genuinely close to the Lord, that is where our authority is truly diminished. Our children can sense whether our obedience to God resembles a list of rules rather than a life of love to be lived and shared. The former is limiting; the latter is something we can grow into by turning to Him, imperfectly and often. The household that is tender, honest, and prayerful is the one that establishes the basis for confidence and wonder in the mystery of Love Himself, the greatest armor against the fear that can so stifle us all no matter our age, gender, or status.

We are not alone in our responsibility. Where our inadequacy exhausts us, the grace of Jesus steps in. He dwells within a mother’s tired prayer over her sleepless newborn and a father’s patience for his teenager’s new attitude. When your child asks you again why she cannot see God, He dwells within your uncertainty as well—in the space where your heart and mind meets that of your child, and you each seek Him together.

Catechesis occurs with every Hail Mary, every forehead blessing from the font, every Our Father before bed. These ordinary acts are part of the extraordinary tapestry of the family that actively grows in faith, upon which the Lord gazes with radiant love.

If you’re ready for your children to know Jesus Christ as a Person and to face fear, failure, and doubt hand in hand with Him, and to know the true freedom found only within that relationship, you are ready to answer Our Lady of Champion’s call—go, fear nothing. See what you and your children discover together and how it draws you closer to Him this month.

O Dear Lady of Champion, you revealed yourself as the Queen of Heaven to your servant Adele. You gave her a mission to pray for the conversion of sinners, to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to others and to prepare the children for the reception of the sacraments.

I trust that as you called Adele to holiness, you are calling me, in my station in life, to live a holy life, devoted to Jesus Christ with the help of your maternal love.

I bring before you now my worries and anxieties. I abandon my attachments to them and place them at your feet. I ask you to hear the deepest longings of my heart as I pray most earnestly for: (your intention).

Dear Lady, you told Adele and you say to all of us “Do not be afraid; I will help you.” Help me now as I place this intention with complete confidence and trust.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be
Our Lady of Champion, pray for us.

Prayer via the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion.