Marathon man joins crusade to get pope to Wisconsin

MARATHON CITY – Ronald Schaub first experienced it on his initial visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in 2011.

The sensation was "peaceful, gentle, and warm," a spiritual healing of a sort thatthe 66-year-old Marathon man said he had never felt before and has encountered nowhere else. And he has experienced it every time he has been back to the shrine, located in Champion about 17 miles northeast of Green Bay.

It is on this site that the Virgin Mary appeared to a woman named Adele Brise on three separate occasions in 1859, according to the Catholic Church. In 2010, Bishop David Ricken of Roman Catholic Diocese of Green Bay declared following a two-year investigation that the appearances did occur, making the shrine the first church-verified visitation site in the United States.

Since that time the shrine has become an international attraction for Catholics like Schaub, who has made an annual pilgrimage to Champion since 2011. It was during one of those pilgrimages that Schaub first had the idea to invite the pope to visit the shrine, and now that Pope Francis is set to visit the United States, Schaub has begun gathering signatures of central Wisconsin residents — Catholic or not — to send on an invitation to the Vatican with the hope that he will gather enough to sway the pope to visit the shrine.

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