‘Thenumberswouldn’tbeas bigas1979,butthey’restill coming,thankGod...nomatter whatyouhear,alotofpeople still have strong religious faith’
“When he visits the Capuchin Centre (for Dublin’s homeless), he’ll do it privately.
“Wherever he goes, he makes a point about seeing the poor, of going to them.”
Comparisons with the 1979 visit will be inevitable, although Grace insists one cannot compare like with like.
“Just because people may not go to Phoenix Park in the sort of numbers they did then does not mean they’re not interested. Many of them will watch from home on their couches.”
Grace believes many people are not as comfortable about declaring themselves to be Catholic as they were a couple of gen- erations ago. “It’s sad that it’s happened, but many so-called liberal people are very intolerant of those with faith. It shouldn’t be like that, but people can be afraid to put their heads above the parapet for simply being proud to be Catholic.”
Young people are thin on the ground in Knock.
The only millennials to be seen are working in the various information centres and bookstores run by the Church.
Some 20-somethings work in the Mass card centres and the facility close to the vast car park is an eye-opener to the first-time visitor. It looks like a bank, with a row of semi-private ‘windows’, where you can pay for Mass cards and have ‘tellers’ take down the details of whom you wish to have prayed for.
Estimates vary widely, but anything between 200,000 and 400,000 descended on Knock for John Paul II 39 years ago.
He was supposed to spend much longer in Knock, but as Tom Byrne recalls, the pontiff was detained over a lengthy lunch by the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey. Consequently, his tight schedule was thrown out of sync.
“The Pope said the very reason he was visiting Ireland was to see Knock,” Byrne says.
“He was always so devoted to Our Lady and he wanted to come to the place where the apparition had happened.”
Knock enjoyed busy years in the decade-and-a-half after that visit, according to Mary Walsh, who has run the Irish Craft Centre in the village since 1985.
“The numbers wouldn’t be as big today,” she says, “but they’re still coming and thank God they’re still coming. No matter what you might hear, there are still an awful lot of people in this country who have a strong religious devotion.”
Brian Crowley, manager of the Knock House Hotel, says the large proportion of repeat visitors is testament to the unique appeal of Knock: “People of all ages feel a strong connection with this place and for those of faith it is a hugely important destination that they want to visit time and again.”
The hotel is especially busy this time of year and booked out around the time Francis will arrive in Ireland, but the manager insists that his establishment will not ratchet up prices.
“That’s not how we operate,” he says. “Our guests are much more important than that.”
Connaught — and parts of Mayo, in particular — suffered enormously in the long period from the Great Famine in 1840s until the birth of the 20th century. Poverty was rife in the 1870s and the Land War would be especially pronounced in the province. Poverty may have been acute, but deep religious devotion was just as ingrained.
Pope Pius IX had elevated the Virgin Mary in the eyes of Catholics with his immaculate conception dogma in 1854 and, four years later, Mary allegedly appeared to a peasant girl in Lourdes in the south of France.
The story of the apparition was well known in Ireland by 1879, when up to 15 people in Knock allegedly witnessed a vision of Mary, Saint Joseph, John the Baptist and Jesus, in the spiritual form of a lamb.
They reportedly appeared on the gable end of the church that had been built in 1828.
One of those locals, Dominic Byrne, is an ancestor of souvenir shop owner John Byrne.
Church “commissions of inquiry” in 1879 and 1936 were satisfied that the incident had taken place and Knock’s shrine status was secured. While major religious events were held there, it wasn’t until the construction of the basilica in 1976 — another achievement by the industrious Monsignor Horan — that the village started to attract numbers that would peak at 1.5 million per annum in the mid-1980s. Only last year, the remains of John Curry, the youngest person to have reportedly witnessed the apparition, were taken from communal plot on Long Island, New York, and buried at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan.
Fr Richard Gibbons, parish priest at Knock, celebrated Mass in the famed church for this member of the “forgotten Irish who had faced the desolation of leaving home never to return”.
“Secular Ireland doesn’t understand this place,” says one woman, a native of Knock who declines to be named.
“And it doesn’t want to. It’s somewhere it can laugh at and think of as a relic of the past.
“But for those who believe, it’s a vital place and I feel very fortunate to have spent all of my life in a place where Our Lady chose to appear. She is very welcome to come back at any time — everyone who comes here would be so happy to see her.”
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