2018 Knock-ing on Heaven’s door The apparition took place on August 21, 1879
It has been a place of pilgrimage since the Holy Family appeared to villagers in 1879 - now locals are hoping the visit of Pope Francis will put Knock back on the map for religious tourists
WHETHER you’re a believer or not, the story of Knock’s holy apparition in 1879 has fascinated the world, attracting millions of pilgrims every year. This Sunday, Pope Francis will be one of them...
The village of Knock in Co. Mayo is awash with Vatican colours and bedecked with bunting, flags and 50,000 flowers as it prepares to welcome Pope Francis on Sunday.
Led by Father Richard Gibbons, parish priest and rector of the Knock Marian Shrine, 45,000 worshippers will attend an 80-minute visit which will include a tour of the village and a private visit by the Pope to the newly refurbished Apparition Chapel.
Knock became internationally famous following an 1879 apparition of the Holy Family to a group of 21 villagers. As part of the Papal visit, the testimonies of 15 witnesses will be read out. Almost 140 years later, the story of the apparition is still central to Knock’s history.
And almost 40 years after Pope John Paul II’s visit, this event will mark the realisation of Monsignor James Horan’s dream.
In 1985, a year before his death, he mobilised the people of Knock parish to raise funds for an airport, catering not only for pilgrims to the Shrine but for future popes.
‘There was no such thing as ‘it can’t be done’ where Monsignor Horan was concerned,’ recalls one local.
Horan’s vision followed that of Judy Coyne, the wife of a Mayo judge who campaigned to bring religious pilgrims to Knock in the 1930s.
With around 1.5 million visitors annually, Knock has not yet achieved its ambition to attract as many religious pilgrims as Lourdes or Fatima. But on Sunday, the dream of welcoming another pope will be fully realised as Francis touches down at Ireland West Airport Knock.
The airport currently welcomes around 750,000 passengers each year. In comparison, Lourdes attracts up to three million pilgrims every year while Fatima was visited by 10 million during its centenary year.
Many Irish people of a certain age visited Knock as children and recall a main street lined with tacky-looking stalls selling religious souvenirs and not much else apart from a Basilica and a few cafes. The stalls were removed for the Papal visit in 1979 and replaced by a row of souvenir shops that are today still owned by members of a local family, the Byrnes.
The Byrnes are descended from Dominic Byrne, one of the visionaries who witnessed an elaborate apparition of Mary, Joseph, St John the Evangelist and the Lamb of God on the gable wall of the parish church on the evening of August 21, 1879.
They belong to generations of Knock locals who have grown up with and believed the testimony of their ancestors — that on a dark, wet August night, an apparition lasting two hours was witnessed by 21 villagers aged between five and 74 — 15 of whom subsequently testified to a Church Commission of Enquiry as to the veracity of their claim.
One witness, Mary O’Connell, continued to affirm what she had witnessed on her deathbed many years later. She and her neighbours had gained nothing from their claim — one man died in poverty in New York while most of the others lived out their lives as ordinary people.
One of five remaining siblings from a family of eight, Bernie Byrne still works behind the counter in his shop, St Martin’s religious goods store.
‘My great-great-grandfather was 36 years old at the time, a small farmer who was out harvesting in the fields,’ he says. ‘He and his first cousin, John Curry, were among the first to see the light in front of the gable wall of the chapel.
‘The Knock apparition is unique, there’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Most other apparitions are of Our Lady but this was a vision of the entire Holy Family.
‘I’m proud and privileged to be part of the Knock story. The area has expanded a lot since the last Papal visit but the shrine is our main focus. Without it we have nothing, apart from a local printing company and a chicken factory.’
In 1879, Knock was a typical rural Irish village — reeling from a famine which severely affected Co. Mayo, struggling with its aftereffects and enduring a land war that often resulted in agrarian violence and the threat of eviction. Keeping a roof over their heads and growing enough crops to feed their families were the only priorities for locals.
Some would argue that strange occurrences like the Knock apparition tend to take place during such times of political crisis.
On the night of the apparition, witnesses — including 45-year-old Mary McLoughlin, 16-year-old Patrick Byrne, 65-year-old Patrick Walsh, eight-year-old Catherine Murray and 74-year-old Bridget Trench — reported seeing a large globe of light near the gable wall of the church and figures that they thought were new statues purchased by the then Monsignor.
The witnesses were reportedly in different parts of the village at the time — some in the fields, some at home — and gathered to gaze at the intricate figures which did not speak and could not be touched.
Although it was a wet night, they recalled the area around the apparition being completely dry.
‘They couldn’t have made up such an elaborate story,’ said one local woman in the 2016 documentary, Strange Occurrences In A Small Irish Village. ‘We have to believe it, they were our ancestors.’
Reports of their vision put the tiny village of Knock — current population circa 2,000 — on the world map and the building of a Basilica followed in 1976.
Under the stewardship of Father Richard Gibbons, who has been parish priest and rector of the Shrine since 2012, both the Basilica and Apparition Chapel have been significantly refurbished through fundraising and visitor donations.
Since 2014, he has spearheaded two programmes of renewal at Knock Shrine, the €14 million Witness to Hope programme, which included refurbishment of the Basilica and a €6 million Together In Faith programme that included the recent refurbishment of the Chapel of the Apparition.
The mosaic in the Basilica was unveiled in February 2016 and features a depiction of the 1979 apparition by artist PJ Lynch, while the gable wall, adorned by a depiction of the apparition, is protected from the elements by a modern building.
Father Gibbons, 48, a trained solicitor, lives in the apartment that Monsignor Horan once lived in and displays the same foresight and business acumen as his famous predecessor.
He oversees the running of the Shrine, the largest employer in the parish with a 100 acre site, 120 fulltime staff, 22 departments and a three-star hotel. Staff figures rise to 160 during busy summer months when pilgrim groups arrive by the bus load, and the annual Novena week, which has just finished, is the village’s busiest time with 150,000 visitors.
During peak pilgrim season, up to
Those who saw the apparition lived normal lives
4,000 confessions a week are heard by retired and student priests in the Reconciliation church. Huge tanks of water are blessed each Sunday before being placed in 15 fonts lining the front wall of the Shrine.
Some locals talk about Knock having an aura, of the feeling that they’re ‘on the inside track’ of holiness. This may be due to the fact that 80 or more retired nuns and priests choose to live in the village along with many devout lay Catholics who want to live in a religious hub.
Believers — including increasing numbers of Americans on bus tours — visit to remember a loved one, seek solace during times of personal crisis or to pray for a cure for a physical ailment. Perhaps Knock’s most famous miracle is that of Marion Carroll, an Athlone woman who claimed she was cured of multiple sclerosis in 1989 during a visit to the Shrine.
She had been wheelchair-bound for nearly three decades but recovered fully from her illness and continues to give talks about her experience. According to a doctor interviewed for the Strange Occurrences In A Small Irish Village documentary, one of the difficulties of her case was that the initial diagnosis of MS had not been fully established.
According to some locals, pilgrims have continued to flock to the Shrine during good times and hard times but in fact, Knock’s fortunes have been mixed in recent years.
Successive Church scandals led to a decline in the number of pilgrims travelling to the site. The recession of the early 2000s, coupled with easier access to international pilgrimage sites meant that Irish visitors who once visited for an entire week are now more likely to visit for just a day. With just one three-star hotel in the village, they’re also more likely to stay overnight in nearby Ballyhaunis or Claremorris.
The outskirts of Knock village are dotted with B&Bs, many of them with names like Divine Mercy, Lamb of God and Shrine View. The owners of these properties will welcome guests from Galway, Cork, Sligo, the North and Britain for the Pope’s visit this weekend and hope that it will put Knock ‘back on the map’ for religious pilgrims.
They describe an atmosphere of excitement and joy in the build-up to his arrival which is the first major event in the village since Mother Teresa’s visit in 1993.
Thirty-nine years ago, Pope John Paul’s visit was almost scuppered by the killing of Lord Mountbatten in nearby Sligo a month earlier. While the visit did go ahead, it proved to be a disappointment for many locals when it had to be cut short due to weather and time constrictions.
Villagers had spent weeks rushing to prepare the area, widening roads and even knocking down a local cafe to make way for the Pope’s entourage.
Sinead Mallee, who works as a graphic designer for Knock Shrine, was just five years old when Pope John Paul II visited, but still has vivid memories of the time.
‘Our family home is very close to the Shrine,’ she says. ‘My father, a photographer, went to the Mass but the rest of the family was barricaded inside the house. So many people came to Knock that day. They stood on the roof of our house, on the window sills — anywhere they could get a view. We couldn’t get out of the house and watched the Mass on TV while it was happening in the church next door.
‘They had wanted to widen the road for the visit and my grandmother’s cafe was knocked down as a result. So there was a lot of disappointment when John Paul was delayed in Galway by Bishop Eamonn Casey. The Bishop wasn’t very popular around here after that.’
Sinead is involved in the Knock Community Futures Group, which has plans to upgrade the village and services on offer via a 2016-2021 action plan. From a struggling rural village in 1879 to a popular 1970s place of pilgrimage, Knock could soon become a village with a wider tourism appeal.
There are plans for a more diverse range of services, including boutiques such as Foxford Woollen Mills, cafes and increased hotel facilities that will encourage families to stay longer.
Father Richard Gibbons was a nine-year-old boy when Pope John Paul II arrived, but he didn’t get to attend the Papal mass. The eldest of six children, he spent the day helping out on his parents’ farm in Louisberg as the trip to Knock was deemed too much for a family of eight to make.
He has been working on attracting Ireland’s huge diaspora to the Shrine. ‘We want to get our name out there and connect the dots between Mayo’s wonderful sites like the ancient pilgrim walk from Ballintubber Abbey to Croagh Patrick,’ he says.
He denies that Knock will become a last bastion of Catholicism in Ireland as Church scandals continue to emerge and secularism increases. His focus is on the renewal of faith and the renewal of visitor numbers to the Shrine, which may well be bolstered by Pope Francis’s visit.
Believers visit Knock to pray for a cure