Greg DalyIt was about seven on the evening of August 21, 1879, while it was still bright, that Mary McLoughlin, housekeeper to the parish priest of Knock, was on her way to visit the Byrne family who lived near the village church. Some distance away from the church she spotted an “extraordinary group” of figures by its gable end. Thinking that perhaps the parish priest, Archdeacon Bartholomew Cavanagh, “had been supplied with these beautiful figures from Dublin or somewhere else”, she hurried on.
About half an hour later Margaret Byrne, while locking up the church, noticed a light off the south gable, but thinking nothing of it went home without looking to find out its source, only to be called back shortly after eight o’clock.
Mary McLoughlin had left the Byrne house with Margaret’s older sister Mary, who spotted the figures when some way off the church, and recognised them as Mary, St Joseph, and – she thought – St John the Evangelist, all standing by an altar upon which stood a lamb. The sun had set and the sky begun to darken, with heavy rain, as Mary Byrne went to call her family while Mary McLoughlin stayed watching.
Word spread, and in all 15 people witnessed the apparition that evening, with it ending about half past nine.
Phenomenon
Local, national and even international newspapers immediately took an interest in the phenomenon, and people began to flock to the site, with which miraculous cures were quickly linked. That October, the Archbishop of Tuam, Dr John MacHale, launched a commission of inquiry, which received depositions from the 15 witnesses and found that taken as a whole, the testimonies of the witnesses was trustworthy.
Although some 5,000 people visited Knock on the fourth anniversary of the vision, interest faded away, and it was not until after 1929, with the apparition’s 50th anniversary, that devotion at the shrine began to grow. Judy Coyne, subsequently Ireland’s first papal dame, founded the Knock Shrine Society with her husband Liam in 1935, the same year that a diocesan commission reviewed the evidence favourably. In the summer of 1939, about 120,000 pilgrims visited the shrine.
In 1960, Prof. Lorenzo Ferri in Rome sculpted the statues that stand now in the shrine’s Apparition Chapel, built off the gable wall where the apparition was witnessed, basing them on the witnesses’ depositions and modelling the face of the Virgin Mary on the image, thought to be of Jesus, preserved on the Shroud of Turin.
Few names are more closely linked with the shrine than that of Msgr James Horan, parish priest of Knock between 1967 and 1986 and a man indelibly associated with the building of Knock airport. It was under his stewardship that the first national novena took place at the shrine in 1977, the year after the official opening of the new Church of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland, built to accommodate as many as 10,000 pilgrims.
Two years later, a month after the centenary of the apparition, St John Paul II visited the shrine where he knelt in silent prayer at the gable wall of the Apparition Chapel, raised the new church to the status of a basilica, and gave the shrine a golden rose reminiscent of the rose one of the witnesses had described Our Lady as wearing in the apparition. He described his visit to Knock as “the goal of my journey to Ireland”.
Since the papal visit, Knock’s fame has continued to grow, with 1.5 million pilgrims visiting the shrine every year. Last year 150,000 people attended the national novena alone. The shrine’s future looks bright.