Michael KellyA new documentary offers a fascinating glimpse of Knock shrine, writes Michael Kelly
Knock holds a special place in the national imagination. For both believer and nonbeliever, the site of the Marian apparitions in 1879 has played an important role in the history of modern Ireland.
Take, for example, Ireland West Airport at Knock – the dream of the ebullient parish priest of Knock Msgr James Horan. It now serves as a gateway from the west to Britain and mainland Europe. And while songwriter Christy Moore may have joked that “From Fatima to Bethlehem and from Lourdes to Kiltimagh, I’ve never seen a miracle like the airport up in Knock” the airport is breathing fresh life from the ‘New World’ in to the historic shrine.
Recent years have seen the arrival of large pilgrim groups from both New York and Boston to Knock led respectively by Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Cardinal Sean O’Malley. The pilgrimages are an opportunity to present Knock and the message of the shrine to a wider audience, many of them Irish Americans who may have heard about the events of 1879 but never visited Knock.
Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village is a new feature-length documentary that opens in selected Irish cinemas next week. It seeks to tell the story of Knock today through the people who live in the town and those who have spent their lives working and ministering at the shrine. It is a film that will appeal both to religious believers and the merely curious.
Vision
From the makers of the touching One Million Dubliners documentary about Glasnevin Cemetery, the film first looks back on the ‘strange occurrences’ of 1879 when local people reported a vision of the Mother of God, St Joseph, St John the Evangelist and the Lamb of God on an altar at the gable of the parish church. The film takes its title from the headline of a newspaper account of the events at Knock at the time.
Directed by Aoife Kelleher and produced by Rachel Lysaght and Lindsay Campbell, the film is beautifully shot and there is wonderfully-fresh aerial footage of the wider Knock campus that give a sense of the scale of the site.
The filmmakers have avoided the temptation to narrate the story of Knock and instead use descendants of the original visionaries and locals to tell the story as it was told and retold to them down through the years.
In a sense Fr Richard Gibbons, the current parish priest of Knock, is the protagonist of the entire film and much of the documentary revolves around his daily routine. Knock is not like any other parish – for one, Fr Gibbons must be the only priest in Ireland managing a staff of over 100 people.
There’s also the fact that he must combine his role as rector of the shrine with the same day-to-day duties as any other parish priest in a rural town. It’s a unique challenge, and Fr Gibbons appears uniquely suited to that challenge.
Knock is a place that combines the very ordinary with the clearly extraordinary.
One local man who is interviewed as part of the film sums it up well: “When you come in to the place you see religion all around you. But, we still live ordinary lives. We love our drink, we like socialising, the people that live here are no different than anybody else…maybe one or two are, but 99% of people who live in Knock are just ordinary people”.
As an editor, I always remind trainee journalists and interns that news is never about buildings or places, but is always about people. Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village captures this beautifully and the reading of the accounts of the 15 official witnesses of apparitions humanise the story of ordinary people who witnessed a supernatural occurrence.
This film does not skirt around difficult subjects, and several people mention the scandals around the Church in Ireland in recent decades and the effects the scandals have had on faith.
Fr Gibbons articulates the uncertainty felt by many: “Right throughout the scandals, there was a fear that people might just simply stop coming and feel that this is not the place for them to be associated with, or to come to because of the fact it is part of the life of the Church.
“We had to come to terms with that too, we had to take all that on board and say ‘what’s going on, what’s happening here and what does that mean for my own personal faith?’” he adds.
But, there is an abiding optimism in Fr Gibbons: “If the Church is to be renewed in Ireland Knock should play its part and its role in that. We feel that Knock has something to offer. If we feel that and we work towards that I would expect the numbers to climb.”
There are many light and good-humoured segments in the documentary, helped along by a sometimes lively and playful score by Hugh Rodgers.
A peculiarity associated with Knock is the famed Knock Marriage Introduction Bureau that has been responsible for facilitating more than 1,000 marriages down the year. There is a hilarious scene where the two people responsible – one with a box containing the files of men seeking wives and the other with a box containing files of the women seeking husbands – try to arrange suitable partnerships. It’s clearly a labour of love.
The documentary offers an insight in to the role of Mary in Catholicism. Cardinal Timothy Dolan – who led a large group of pilgrims from New York – explains Marian devotion in a simple way. “We all like to go home to our mother – I do. There’s unconditional love, there’s tenderness, she knows what foods I like! So you always feel at home with your mother, and that’s how Marian shrines are. That’s how Knock is.”
There are moments in Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village that are both painful and redemptive at the same time. The filmmakers follow some teenage boys who have walked to the shrine barefoot for the 6am Mass on the Feast of the Assumption. As the boys rest leaning against the wall of the parish church, they are in reflective mood. “The walk was hard, it took me five and a half hours…very hard. I did it for my cousin Jonathan, he died there about a month and half ago, only 16 years of age when he drowned…so I walked it for him.”
His friend was philosophical about the walk. “That’s how it is, it has to be done…that’s our religion, we have to keep it going, keep it lit. There’s life in the old dog yet, we have to keep that fire burning.”
Confession is described as the “engine room” of the Knock experience, and we meet another pilgrim in the Chapel of Reconciliation who is mourning her husband who died four years ago. Before he passed away, his wife describes how they spent a day together at Knock. The same woman’s son died just two years before her husband. “I would’ve felt ‘is there a God even?’…I do actually get peace here, that’s why I keep coming back.”
Compelling stories
In the film, we meet many people with compelling stories, those who believe they have been healed of seemingly incurable conditions and those seeking healing of body and soul. Their stories are told beautifully.
There are some moments that make one cringe, but these too are part of the stories of Knock.
Overall, Fr Gibbons presents a compelling case for Knock’s central role in the renewal of the Church in Ireland, and one can’t help but think that it is men such as Fr Gibbons who will be the leaders of a renewed vision of the Church here.
“There are engagements with modern Irish society, there are debates to be had, but these are debates and we won’t be found wanting in those debates. I don’t see us retreating, we don’t intend to pull up the drawbridge just yet – or any time at all.”
People love a good story and Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village is a beautifully-made piece of cinema that tells a compelling story of faith lived with hope in challenging times. But nor does it shy away from scandal, falling Mass attendance and existential questions around the Church in Ireland.
The filmmakers avoid all-too-easy clichés about the place of faith in modern Ireland and thus offer a film that will both fascinate and entertain the religious and non-religious alike.