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Discovering the Tale of the World Shrine of the Green Scapular

October 3, 2024

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Good Things Out of Monona? Nico Fassino sketches the history.

Unsatisfied with the “beige Catholicism” criticized by Bishop Robert Barron, many young Catholics are on a quest to rediscover traditional Catholic devotions. For instance, a recent article interviewed young Catholic women who wear chapel veils in church. One doesn’t have to spend too much time in a parish young adult group or a Theology on Tap before seeing a young man showing others his rugged Combat Rosary. At the annual roots-music festival Appaloosa, held in Front Royal, Virginia, home to a thriving Catholic community around Christendom College, it seemed that more attendees than not had a scapular around their necks. 

G.K. Chesterton once implored his readers to “let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair,” and those who have loved before know that particular cherished items or practices naturally arise in such a context. In loving, we give gifts which retain something of the character of the giver; we build shared habits, such as cooking certain meals or taking a particular hike together. Particular devotions are simply evidence that in the love affair that is our life with God in the Church, he has long loved us and seeks to give us many beautiful things. As Catholic historian Christopher Dawson would say, it is religion which brings about the emergence of culture.

When I was younger, I remember my grandmother having a particular devotion to the green scapular, two green pieces of felt on a cord which had the image of Mary’s Immaculate Heart on them. She would put them everywhere: in the glove compartments of the cars, in her children’s houses when she came to visit, and of course around her neck. It wasn’t until college that I would learn about the origin of scapulars, that they derived from the larger garments of religious brothers and sisters, and typically connected to a particular religious order—the popular brown scapular, for instance, derives from the habit of the Carmelites, both of which are held by tradition to have been given to St. Simon Stock by Our Lady in the thirteenth century. But only now, reading Nico Fassino’s short historical sketch, have I learned about the emergence of the green scapular, and how it is that a devotion that came to be in nineteenth century France would become so popular with my Indian grandmother in twentieth century America.

He handed him a bundle of green scapulars and told him to get to work.

Catholics have a special reverence for the small: the mystery of the Incarnation, by which God the Son became man, has been referred to as “the scandal of the particular.” God chose to become the son of a particular woman, in a particular family, in a particular place—and that a place of little repute. In the beginning of his Gospel, St. John articulates an objection to Jesus perhaps familiar to the early Church. Nathanael asks Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Such was the state of Wisconsin, and particularly the small town of Monona, a suburb of Madison, in the early twentieth century—and yet, as Fassino describes, it was here that from a chicken coop was to be built a World Shrine to Our Lady of the Green Scapular, which was to receive thousands upon thousands of letters from around the globe, and countless pilgrims and possible miracles.

The story focuses on the priest at the heart of the Shrine, Fr. Jerome Mersberger, but as the priesthood is a sharing in the ministry of the bishops, his own bishop William O’Connor plays a crucial role as well. O’Connor was a military chaplain in World War I, serving the 32nd Infantry Division in France, and while there discovered his mission to serve the Immaculate Heart of Mary. As Fassino recounts, O’Connor, known for his preaching, was in the particularly deadly Battle of Argonne and subject to poison gas, which for a time deprived him of his ability to walk or speak. He remained with the troops, but his recovery was slow, and “physicians were convinced he would never preach again.” He received permission to join a soldier’s pilgrimage to Lourdes to pray for healing, but soon found out that, as the priest scheduled to preach was injured in a car accident, he had been selected to give the homily. Fassino recounts the moment simply and eloquently:

He turned to Our Lady, who on that very day sixty-one years earlier had announced herself as the ‘Immaculate’ to young Bernadette Soubirous, and he made a request: if Mary would intercede to strengthen and preserve his voice, he promised ‘to use it as often as possible in the service of Her Divine Son.’ With the clock ticking, Father O’Connor recounted how he readied himself for the sermon: ‘I smoked a cigarette and then said a rosary and that was my preparation.’ His voice was healed, and those present in Lourdes that day often said that O’Connor had preached the best sermon they ever heard. (9)

The rest, in a way, was history. O’Connor would be consecrated to the episcopacy during World War II and given the care of the newly created Diocese of Madison, which swelled under his pastoral governance, its number of priests and faithful more than doubling from 1946 to 1967 when he resigned. When O’Connor gave the care of a new parish in Monona, which he named Immaculate Heart of Mary, to a young priest, Fr. Jerome Mersberger, he handed him a bundle of green scapulars and told him to get to work.

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The meteoric rise of Immaculate Heart of Mary parish, which quickly grew out of its first church built out of a former chicken coop, occasioned the creation of a school staffed by religious sisters and the World Shrine of the Green Scapular, to which Fr. Mersberger had a real devotion. It is an inspiring tale for us today, as unfortunately in many places, such as Seattle, New York, and Madison itself, many parishes are being consolidated and churches being closed due to the decline in the Catholic populations. The growth of Immaculate Heart of Mary parish shows that heroic priests and a small group of faithful who place themselves under the patronage of the Blessed Mother can make a tremendous difference in evangelizing their communities. 

The fall of the World Shrine provides us with a particular window into the devotional life of the American Church in the period immediately after the Second Vatican Council. As Anglican art historian Matthew Milliner said in an interview, “I have my admiration and love for Vatican II and those wonderful documents, but we’ve all been in churches where we’re like, ‘What happened to the Virgin Mary?’ . . . At the end of the day, Vatican II was a huge dethronement of Mary.” Catholic theologians Larry Chapp and Fr. John Nepil also briefly discuss this problem and helpfully provide more universal context for this particular story (see minute 42). As Fassino explains, progressive interpreters of the council, particularly among the clergy and including men being ordained bishops, thought of the Church’s Marian devotion as retrograde, part of a prior age. He does a good job of providing context for how much the world was changing at the time, in many ways we tend to take for granted: for instance, the rise of super-highways which cut through cities, destroying neighborhoods and leading to the tearing out of inner-city train lines. The new bishop of Madison, Cletus O’Donnell, was a priest according to the order of newly enlightened sensibilities, and had little sympathy with Fr. Mersberger’s Shrine and its mission, and when conflict arose in the parish, asked him to leave the tremendous community which he had helped build from its humble origins.

Courtesy of Irving Book Company

The story as Fassino tells it should inspire us, warn us, and encourage us. It is the story of the rise and fall of the World Shrine of the Green Scapular, but is occasioned by the re-dedication of the Shrine under Bishop Donald Hying and the current parish priest, Fr. Chad Droessler, who writes a foreword for the book. This book, published by a small publisher, should be particularly cared for by Catholics young and old; it is beautifully designed, well bound (unlike many books printed today, as Joshua Hochschild has discussed), and well worth the money for the testimony it provides to the universal nature of the Church by its inclusion of letters to the Shrine from places as far from Wisconsin as Africa, Sri Lanka, and Poland. What this story has for Catholics today is proof of the profound effect a small, determined Catholic community—a “creative minority” as Pope Benedict XVI would say—can have on the faith of the world.