July 19, 1999

A shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe could be built in the town of Shelby to serve as a focal point for devotional pilgrimages for Roman Catholics in the Diocese of La Crosse.
Bishop Raymond Burke said he has architects and contractors working on developing plans for the shrine, which would be built on a 90-acre site off Hwy. 14, along Hwy. MM.

The shrine would be used for pilgrimages and devotional purposes and would not take the place of any parish churches, Burke said.

He said the cost of the project is still to be estimated, but all money for it will come from donations, not out of diocesan funds. He said a separate corporation will be set up to administer the shrine and that funding will have an endow ment built in to take care of operating costs and future maintenance.

Once details are worked out, Burke said, he plans to hold a press conference to announce the project. He said he would like to make the announcement near Dec. 12, the annual feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

A shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe is appropriate because it honors the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, to a poor Mexican Indian peasant, Juan Diego, in Mexico City in 1531, Burke said.

The apparition came to Diego to help and unite all the peoples of the American continent, not just people in Mexico, the bishop said.

The apparition, which is considered authentic by the Roman Catholic Church, asked Diego to request his bishop to build a church on the site. The Lady appeared three times to Diego and once to his uncle. When Diego finally got up enough courage to approach the bishop, he discovered that an image of the apparition was etched on his tilma, a type of outer garment.

The nearly 500-year-old image hangs in the modern-day Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe located at the north end of Mexico City, where it is venerated daily by the thousands of pilgrims who come to the site each year.

The purpose of putting up a shrine in the La Crosse diocese is to encourage people in the diocese to become more devotional in their prayer life, Burke said.

He said devotional life has declined among Catholics since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-'60s, and he would like to see it restored.

"There is a real hunger for it, especially among young people," Burke said.

Burke said he first thought about the project when he became bishop of the diocese in 1995 and wrote about his idea in a pastoral letter in 1996. Some major gifts for the project, totaling about $300,000, have come in from a few donors, he said.

The site proposed for the shrine is land owned by the family of the late Robert Swing, a diocesan member, Burke said. Swing's wife, Lucille, the couple's daughter, Jeanne Pavela, and son, the Rev. John Swing, donated the site to the diocese. John Swing is a La Crosse diocesan priest.

Preliminary plans call for the shrine to be built at the top of the bluff, Burke said. The site would include a 350 to 450-seat church, plus an area for presentations to explain the Guadalupe apparition.

The church would not be a basilica, which is a designation given only by the pope for churches that have become major sites of devotion and veneration.

"The hope is that in time the place will be such a site of devotion the Holy Father would bestow the name basilica on it," Burke said.

Burke said there has been some misunderstanding about the project, partly because some people in the diocese thought the shrine was going to be a new parish church that would take away members from other parishes.

He said he has received several letters from concerned people and also has had several phone calls. He said he has answered the inquiries and believes that the people have been more receptive once he explained the project.

Burke said he has written two columns in recent weeks in the diocesan newspaper about devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Basilica in Mexico City and plans to lay out his proposal for the diocese in a column in the July 22 edition of the newspaper.