Knock, County Mayo
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This article refers to Knock in County Mayo, Ireland. For other uses, please see Knock
Knock
An Cnoc, Cnoc Mhuire
Location


Coordinates:
53°47′00″N 8°55′00″W / 53.7833°N 8.91667°W / 53.7833; -8.91667
Irish grid reference
M396818
Statistics
Province: Connacht
County: County Mayo
Elevation: 78 m
Population (2002)
- Town:
- Environs:

595
1,404

Knock, County MayoKnock (Irish: An Cnoc, meaning The Hill – but now more generally known in Irish as Cnoc Mhuire, "Hill of (the Virgin) Mary") is a small town in County Mayo, Ireland whose notability derives from the Knock Shrine where it is claimed the Virgin Mary, together with St Joseph and St John the Evangelist, appeared in 1879. In the 20th century it became one of Europe's major Catholic Marian shrines, alongside Lourdes and Fatima. One and a half million pilgrims visit Knock Shrine annually. It was visited by Pope John Paul II, a supporter of devotion to the Virgin Mary, in 1979 to commemorate the centenary of the apparition.

Knock was bypassed by the N17 Road in December 2002.

[Knock Shrine
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(Find sources: Knock Shrine – news, books, scholar)

Our Lady of Knock, Queen of Ireland Basilica.Knock Shrine (Irish: Scrín Chnoc Mhuire) is a major Catholic pilgrimage site in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland where it is claimed there was an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St Joseph, St John the Evangelist and Jesus Christ (as the Lamb of God) in 1879.

Contents [hide]
1 The witnesses
2 Details of the apparition
3 Church Commissions of inquiry
4 Scepticisms
4.1 "Magic Lantern" theory
4.2 Unhelpful priests theory
5 Cultural context
6 Archdeacon Kavanagh
7 The pilgrimage site
8 Knock today
9 Purported Solar Phenomena
10 References
11 See also
12 External links
13 Further reading


[edit] The witnesses
On 21 August 1879, Miss Mary McLoughlin, 45, housekeeper to Archdeacon Kavanagh, went to the nearby cottage of Mrs Mary Byrne at about 7 p.m.. On her way she passed by the south gable of Knock parish church. "On passing by the chapel, and at a little distance from it, I saw a wonderful number of strange figures at the gable; one like the Blessed Virgin Mary, and one like St. Joseph; I saw an altar." Miss McLoughlin thought that possibly the Archdeacon had been supplied with the figures from Dublin or elsewhere, and passed on to the home of the widow Margaret Byrne and her children, where she said nothing initially.

After half an hour, Mary McLoughlin returned to the church with Miss Mary Beirne, 29, to lock up the church, they beheld the vision. Mary Beirne went to fetch her brother Dominick Beirne, 20. He worked as assistant to Archdeacon Kavanagh. Shortly after she sent a little girl, her niece, Catherine Murray, 8, who was staying with them, running back to fetch her mother, Mrs Margaret Beirne, and her sister Miss Margaret Byrne, 21.

The Beirnes alerted some of their neighbours to the apparition. Dominick Beirne ran to the home of his cousin, Dominick Beirne who came, as did Patrick Hill, 13; and a servant boy, John Durkan, 24; and a little boy called John Curry, six years old. Dominick Byrne also called to the house of Patrick Beirne, 16, who came and saw the apparition. Mary Beirne called to the home of Judith Campbell, 22, who also witnessed the apparition, as did Bridget Trench, 74 or 75 years old, who gave a vivid account of the apparition.

Two other people also witnessed the apparition, although they did not realise its significance until later. Mrs Hugh Flatley, 44, who happened to pass by the church at 8 p.m. and thought the parish priest "had been ornamenting the church, and got some beautiful likenesses removed outside." Patrick Walsh was playing marbles on his land around 9 p.m. some half a mile from the church: "I saw a very bright light on the southern gable end of the chapel; it seemed to me to be a large globe of golden beer; I never saw, I thought, so brilliant a light before; it appeared high up in the air above around the chapel gable and it was circular in appearance; it was quite stationary, and it seemed to retain the same brilliancy all through."

[edit] Details of the apparition
On the evening of 21 August 1879, people whose ages ranged from five years to seventy-five and included men, women, teenagers,children, witnessed what they claimed was an apparition of Our Lady, St Joseph, and St John the Evangelist at the south gable end of the local small parish church, the Church of St John the Baptist. Behind them and a little to the left of St John was a plain altar. On the altar was a cross and a lamb (a traditional image of Jesus, as reflected in the religious phrase The Lamb of God) with adoring angels.

The Blessed Virgin Mary was described as being very beautiful, standing a few feet above the ground. She wore a white cloak, hanging in full folds and fastened at the neck. The crown appeared brilliant, and of a golden brightness, of a deeper hue, than the striking whiteness of the robe she wore; the upper parts of the crown appeared to be a series of sparkles, or glittering crosses. She was described as "deep in prayer", with her eyes raised to heaven, her hands raised to the shoulders or a little higher, the palms inclined slightly to the shoulders. Bridget Trench "went in immediately to kiss, as I thought, the feet of the Blessed Virgin; but I felt nothing in the embrace but the wall, and I wondered why I could not feel with my hands the figures which I had so plainly and so distinctly seen".


Altar sculpture at Knock, based on accounts of the apparition.St Joseph, also wearing white robes, stood on the Virgin's right hand. His head was bent forward from the shoulders towards the Blessed Virgin in respect.

St John the Evangelist stood to the left of the Blessed Virgin. He was dressed in a long robe and wore a mitre. He was partly turned away from the other figures. He appeared to be preaching and he held open a large book in his left hand.

To the left of St John was an altar with a lamb on it with a cross standing on the altar behind the lamb.

Those who witnessed the apparition stood in the pouring rain for up to two hours reciting the Rosary, a traditional Catholic prayer. When the apparition began there was good light, but although it then became very dark, witnesses could still see the figures very clearly - they appeared to be the colour of a bright whitish light. The apparition did not flicker or move in any way. The witnesses reported that the ground around the figures remained completely dry during the apparition although the wind was blowing from the south. Afterwards, however the ground at the gable became wet and the gable dark.

To put it in its historical context, this apparition took place only nine years after the declaration of papal infallibility, and shortly before the death of Archbishop MacHale.

[edit] Church Commissions of inquiry
An ecclesiastical Commission of inquiry was established by the Archbishop of Tuam, Most Rev. Dr. John MacHale. The Commission's final verdict was that the testimony of all the witnesses taken as a whole is trustworthy and satisfactory. At a second Commission of inquiry in 1936, the surviving witnesses confirmed the evidence they gave to the first Commission.

[edit] Scepticisms
[edit] "Magic Lantern" theory
The description given by the witnesses of flat two-dimensional figures that did not move has led some to believe the apparition was created using a magic lantern - an early form of projector. The fact that there was a bright circular light surrounding the figures lends further credence to this view. Dr. Lennon, Professor of Science at Maynooth College, tested that possibility and concluded it was impossible for the image to be generated in this way (by proving direct projection unlikely). However, it was shown by a British television show that a simple shaving mirror could achieve the results Dr Lennon claimed impossible. Similar appearances on the same church gable were reported on February 9 and on March 25 and 26, 1880.[1]

In the late 1960s the professor of Logic and Psychology at the National University (University College Dublin), Rev. Feichin O'Doherty, told a postgraduate student that, in line with his reputation for investigating alleged parapsychological reports for the Irish bishops, he had been asked to investigate the reported events at Knock. O'Doherty said that there was a document in an archive of the diocese of Tuam in which the writer from the North, many years later, gave an account of how his brother, a policeman in Knock at the time of the claimed apparition, had projected an image on the gable wall of the Church from a local school, using a "magic lantern". However, since this account came from the policeman's brother rather than from the policeman himself, its value is questionable.

[edit] Unhelpful priests theory
Professor Eugene Hynes considers that the apparitions are typical of cases in Ireland where it was claimed that holy persons appeared to the impoverished faithful at times of spiritual stress, such as around a deathbed, when a priest was either too lazy or expensive to help. One of the Knock apparitions was of a popular former bishop who was then edited out of the story, perhaps because he was not a saint. The local priests Kavanagh and Burke had opposed agitation supporting the Land War, causing a local "indignation meeting" in June 1879. When the story spread, the priests revealed their version of events to the mainly Dublin-based newspapers, neglecting to mention their indirect involvement. Hynes considers that the pressmen did not know about the local tradition of apparitions taking the place of absent priests.[2]

[edit] Cultural context
Subsequent sociologists, while neither accepting nor disputing what had allegedly occurred, but seeking to understand its cultural context, noted the timing of the events: how as at Lourdes and Fatima the "visitations" occurred at a time of immense cultural, social and economic change, and occurred to people whose traditional society was under threat from dramatic change. In the 1870s, Ireland was undergoing a period of dramatic upheaval. Some parts of the island had experienced what proved to be the last waves of a famine but which nevertheless brought back memories of the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s that had decimated the countryside.

The appearance of railways brought new travel opportunities and challenges to closeknit communities, while the 1870s saw the beginnings of land reform that would change Irish rural life, reform initially fought for through mass mobilisation and sometimes violence in the Land War, led by organisations like Michael Davitt's Land League and through the radical political leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. The land agent Captain Boycott, who was ostracised in 1880 on account of seeking rents from tenant farmers during a rent strike, became a worldwide cause célèbre, so creating the verb to boycott meaning "to ostracise completely", was also based in County Mayo. In a time of change, symbols like the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph (known together within Catholicism as the Holy Family) marked a reminder of stability and tradition in a society whose change many people found bewildering. Depending on whether one accepted the veracity of the accounts of apparation or the religious beliefs underpinning it, it could be seen either as a delusion by a marginalised traditional society clinging to old certainties, or, in a Catholic religious context, the appearance of the "Mother of God" to people marginalised by society to show her support and offer her comfort.

A similar apparition reported by another teenaged girl at Lourdes, France, in 1858 had been well publicised across Ireland by 1879. In turn, the long-standing Catholic devotion to Mary had been emphasised by the new feast of the Immaculate Conception that was proclaimed in 1854.

Many Irish rural communities were occasionally prone to delusional visions linked to religious matters. Primary education was controlled by the churches and had more religious content than is normal today. The apparition story was published fifteen years before the different but equally remarkable case of Bridget Cleary.

[edit] Archdeacon Kavanagh
A series of articles on
Roman Catholic
Mariology



General articles
Overview of Mariology •
Veneration of the Blessed Virgin • History of Mariology

Expressions of devotion
Art • Music • Architecture

Specific articles
Apparitions • Saints • Popes • Dogmas and Doctrines • Movements & Societies

The parish priest at the time of the apparition was The Very Reverend Doctor Bartholomew A. Kavanagh, who was also Archdeacon of the diocese.It has often been said it was no coincidence that the Virgin Mary chose to appear in Knock while Kavanagh was the parish priest. Widely considered a very holy priest in spite of his siding with landlords against the growing Land League movement, he was appointed parish priest of Knock-Aghamore in 1867, and was about 58 at the time of the apparition. He died in 1897 and is buried in the Old Church.

[edit] The pilgrimage site
The growth of railways and the appearance of local and national newspapers fueled interest in the small Mayo village. Reports of "strange occurrences in a small Irish village" were featured almost immediately in the international media, notably The Times (of London). Newspapers from as far away as Chicago sent reporters to cover the Knock phenomenon, while Queen Victoria asked her government in Dublin Castle to send her a report about the event. In later years Catholic nationalists used the apparition to symbolically challenge Queen Victoria and her descendants' position in Ireland using for Our Lady of Knock the title Our Lady, Queen of Ireland.[citation needed][when?]

[edit] Knock today
Though it remained for almost 100 years a major Irish pilgrimage site, Knock established itself as a world religious site in large measure during the last quarter of the twentieth century, largely due to the work of its longterm parish priest Monsignor James Horan.Horan presided over a major rebuilding of the site, with the provision of a new large Knock Basilica (the first in Ireland) alongside the old church, which could no longer cope with visitor numbers.[citation needed] In 1979, the centenary of the apparition, Pope John Paul II, himself a devotee of Mary, visited Knock Shrine and stated that it was the goal of his Irish visit. On this occasion he presented a Golden Rose, a seldom-bestowed token of papal honour and recognition.

Controversially, Horan secured from Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey millions of pounds of state aid to build a major airport near Knock. The project was condemned by critics in the media. At the time the Irish economy was in depression with massive emigration. Contrary to the critics' expectation however - and with the advent of low-fare and discount airlines - Horan International Airport (now known as Ireland West Airport Knock) became a commercial success, drawing not just pilgrims as well as passengers, but also becoming the air-gateway for the whole of Connacht.[citation needed]

[edit] Purported Solar Phenomena
In October 2009, Knock was in the news when many people reported observing "miraculous" solar phenomena similar to the Miracle of the Sun widely believed to have occurred at the time of the Fatima apparitions. The phenomena had been "prophesied" by Dublin-based mystic Joe Coleman a few weeks earlier; however the reports have been met with scepticism and the local Archbishop has warned Catholic congregations against putting any faith in these phenomena.[3] [4]

After the pilgrims had left the shrine after this event, the manager had to call in industrial cleaners to remove the rubbish left, including spilt food and drink.[5][6] He also said that he would review whether gatherings would be allowed, citing health and safety issues as one problem.[5]

[edit] References
^ http://www.answers.com/topic/knock
^ Hynes E. Knock: the Virgin's apparition in Nineteenth Century Ireland (2008 Cork University Press)
^ http://www.independent.ie/national-news/archbishop-enters-row-over-knock-sun-miracle-1924930.html
^ http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/1028/1224257549789.html?via=mr
^ a b Shrine staff forced to clean up mess left by Knock pilgrims, John Cooney, Irish Independent, 3 November 2009
^ Gathering at Knock 'anything but holy', says shrine manager, Steven Carroll, The Irish Times, 3 November 2009
[edit] See also
Blessed Virgin Mary (Roman Catholic)
Marian apparitions
Knock, County Mayo
Republic of Ireland
Roman Catholic Church
Walsingham
Shrines to the Virgin Mary
Fatima
Lourdes
[edit] External links
Official website of Knock Shrine
Website about the town of Knock
Horan International Airport (Knock Airport) website
Knock Shrine Association of America
Photo documentation
The music for the song "Lady of Knock"
[edit] Further reading
John MacPhilpin. The Apparitions and Miracles at Knock. PJ Kennedy. 1904
Sister Mary Francis Clark. Three Visits to Knock. PJ Kennedy. 1904
Neary, Tom, I Saw Our Lady.
Coordinates: 53°47′32″N 8°55′04″W / 53.79209897°N 8.91765942°W / 53.79209897; -8.91765942
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_Shrine"
Categories: Marian shrines | Roman Catholic Church in Ireland | Pilgrimages | Places of worship in County Mayo | Basilica churches in Europe | Recipients of the Golden Rose
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