Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine Dedication

The Catholic hot spot this week - the place all the sacramentally inclined will see and be seen - is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin. This Thursday, on the sixth anniversary of the canonization of St. Juan Diego, the shrine will be dedicated. The dedication is a ticket event that has left pilgrims scrambling for tickets. At this point, the only way to get a ticket is if a reserved one is left unclaimed on the day of the event.

The shrine complex, a 103 acre site, is expecting roughly 200 priests, along with bishops, archbishops and cardinals at the dedication Mass. EWTN's news director, Raymond Arroyo, will be part of the network's coverage of the event beginning at 1 P.M. Two other known notable expected to be in attendance are authors Ann Ball and "Bella" star Eduardo Verastegui.

Raymond Arroyo, Eduardo Verástegui and Ann Ball will be have a signing - DVD for Verastegui, books for Arroyo and Ball - from 9 until 10:30 that morning.

During the construction phase, the shrine was visited by 50, 000 pilgrims from the upper Midwest portion of the United States last year. Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine spokesman Jack Socha anticipates the shrine to be more than a spiritual epicenter for the area. He feels the volume of visitors will cause economic development in the region.

If you live in this part of the world or just want to check-out more about this shrine, here are some sites to visit:

Event Calendar - http://www.lacrossevisitor.com/Pages/featured.html

Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine Website -

http://www.guadalupeshrine.org/Home/Home.asp

Apparitions Officially Recognized

At a televised Mass broadcast throughout France, Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco Leandri announced yesterday that he has officially recognized that the Virgin Mary appeared to a young sheperdess named Benoite Rencurel from 1664 until her death at the end of 1718. His approval comes as at the conclusion of an investigation by a panel which included two theologians and a judge. On the site of the apparitions is the Notre-Dame-du-Laus Catholic Church which was built in response to the Blessed Mother asking early on, after appearing every day for four months to the girl, that a church and home for priests be built. Although prior to this the site had not been an official shrine of the Church, roughly 120,000 people visit it annually. The shrine even has a website in French on the net.

This makes me think of the two big reasons people have against the Medjugorje apparitions - that the apparitions have supposedly been going on for such a long time and that the Bishop of the area does not support it as a pilgrimage site. I wonder if 300 or so years from now the prelate of Medjugorje will declare the seers and the apparitions valid. Then again, I wonder about lots of stuff. I'm even wondering about the reporting of this announcement by Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco Leandri - not one of the Catholic news groups is reporting this story. Should I believe that the Church is really fully behind this?

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***** I just checked the Catholic News Agencies - about twelve hours since I originally posted this - and have found that they are now reporting on this story.

I'm now wondering why none of the stories run anywhere have mentioned what the Church is saying about the fact that Blessed Benoite Rencurel not only reported visitations by the Blessed Virgin Mary, but also Jesus Christ. I'm assuming that all things related to her having celestial communications have been approved, yet...