The Kevelaer apparition: Hendrick Busman's voice and Mechel Schrouse's vision of a lighted shrine, 1641 to 1642

The Duchy of Guelders, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. On 1 August 1635 Croatian mercenaries massacred 100 Kevelaer residents in their redoubt. On the road from Weeze toward Geldern, at a crossroads in the middle of the Kevelaerer Heide, stood a Hagelkreuz. A hail cross. A simple wayside crucifix.

Shortly before Christmas 1641, Hendrick Busman, a travelling merchant from Geldern, stopped at the cross to pray. A voice spoke. "Build a little chapel for Me here." He looked around and saw no one. He walked on.

Seven or eight days later it came again. Then a third time. Busman feared it was a deception and stood still for a while. Then he began to save, two or three coins a day, toward a chapel that would cost about 100 guilders. He worried that his wife would object to the expense.

About a month before Pentecost 1642, at night, the vision came to Mechel Schrouse. Her room was lit up. She saw "a large, shining light", and in the middle of it "a holy house with a devotional image". She knew the picture, a print of Our Lady of Luxembourg, the Consolatrix Afflictorum, which two soldiers had recently tried to sell her. She had found it too expensive.

Busman did not see the vision himself. But soldiers on night patrol noticed a light in his house. That, one account says, is what made him believe his wife.

The soldiers had handed the prints to a lieutenant of the Mackewitz Company, captured in a battle fought by General Lamboy and held in Kempen. Mechel went to him and explained why she wanted it. He let her choose one. Busman mounted it on a small painted board.

In Geldern the Carmelite sisters, then the Capuchins, displayed it, and crowds brought candles and money. Busman hid the image. On the evening of Saturday 31 May, parish priest Johannes Schink fetched it quietly. On Sunday, 1 June 1642, it was set in the little shrine, built in the same place where Busman had heard the voice. Its base still carries the couple's names and the year 1642.

13 February 1647. A synod of the Diocese of Roermond met at the ter Weide monastery in Venlo, and twenty clergymen and four doctors questioned Hendrick Busman under oath. According to H.A. Banning's 1872 account, the reported cures were checked for natural causes, and eight were confirmed as miraculous. Busman's statement is said to close: "I say this to the increase of the glory of God and of His Holy Virgin Mother." The synod approved Kevelaer as a place of pilgrimage.

The sources do not always agree. The wife's surname appears as Schrouse, Schouse and Scholt, and the deposition is dated both 1642 and 1647. Secular histories speak of tradition. A sceptical reading notes that Mechel had already seen the print before her vision, and that a light in a house at night has ordinary candidates. No hoax claim has surfaced.

In 1654 a hexagonal Gnadenkapelle, modelled on Scherpenheuvel, rose over the shrine. In 1822 Heinrich Heine made the pilgrimage the subject of Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar, later set to music by Engelbert Humperdinck and Ferdinand Hiller. In 1892 the image received a golden crown. In 1987 Pope John Paul II came. Today some 700,000 to 1 million pilgrims a year arrive at the spot where a merchant once heard a voice, and saw no one.