“Mom,” Karen Tipps’s 12-year-old son Simon said on a Wednesday afternoon late last year, “our quiet little home isn’t gonna be so quiet anymore.”
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Karen Tipps and her husband are the shrine’s caretakers—a task that became far more intense after it received a rare designation. On December 8, the Catholic church affirmed the shrine as one of about a dozen sites worldwide—and the first in the U.S.—to have received a visit from the Virgin Mary.
The shrine expanded its parking lot last year and added a porta-potty to handle the overflow. But “we had a really bad wind and the porta-potty blew over,” Tipps says. The shrine is now looking at more sustainable infrastructure improvements. All funding will come through donations. “That’s how the shrine has survived all these years,” Tipps says. “She”—the blessed virgin—”sends people just when we need them, not before. She makes us worry a little bit, but it’s all right.”
Despite having to relinquish some of the quiet to which she’d grown accustomed, Tipps says she’s happy for the attention brought on by the affirmation of Mary’s visit. And she hopes the renewed interest in Adele Brise will help spread the message for which Brise was used as a holy conduit—the education of children.
