On a wet evening in the County Mayo village of Knock 143 years ago, 15 people saw the apparition of Our Lady, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, and a lamb standing on an altar before a cross on the gable wall of the parish church.
The event was to have a profound impact on the small, relatively unknown village.
While the feast of Knock is celebrated on 17 August, the 21st August marks the Anniversary of the apparitions, and is a local feast day in knock and for pilgrims visiting the Marian shrine on that day.
Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Knock
Although the Anniversary of the Apparition takes place on the 21st Aug, the 17th Aug was chosen as the Feast day of Our Lady of Knock, as the 21 August is the feast day of St. Pius X.
Prayer to Our Lady of Knock..https://t.co/S9jrMN7hbE pic.twitter.com/K7I6oduuhj
— Knock Shrine (@knockshrine) August 17, 2022
Today in 1879 locals in Knock reported an apparition of the Mother of God, St Joseph and St John the Evangelist. Heaven touched earth at a difficult moment in the history of the Irish people. @knockshrine is a story of Mary always on the side of the poor and the powerless. pic.twitter.com/rF2f5r6gI8
— Michael Kelly ن (@MichaelPTKelly) August 21, 2022
The Apparition of Our Lady of Knock occurred during a potato blight year in Mayo, one of the areas worst affected since the Famine struck in 1847.
On the evening of 21 August, 1879, the vigil of the octave of the feast of the Assumption, 15 people reported to have witnessed the apparition, ranging in age from five to 75 years-old. Mary Beirne (26) along with the housekeeper for the parish priest, Mary McLoughlin, were the first to witness the miracle at around 8pm.
Beirne ran home to tell her parents about what she had seen, and word soon reached other locals. All 15 parishioners witnessed the silent vision on the gable wall, standing up, for roughly two hours while praying the rosary.
Thanks to the long summer nights, it was still daylight when the apparition started, but the weather quickly worsened and it started to rain heavily as the apparition went on. Incredibly, the area around the apparition seemed to be unaffected by the rain, with the ground remaining dry during the apparition. Those who witnessed the apparition reported that the gable of the Church where the vision took place was immersed in a cloud of light.
The apparition is famous for being a completely silent apparition during which Our Lady did not speak at all.
The locals reported that Saint Joseph was also present during the apparition, dressed in a white robe, standing at Our Lady’s right hand side. They recalled how, during the apparition, the foster father of Jesus inclined his head towards the Blessed Virgin. Saint John the Evangelist was also present. Dressed in a miter, he appeared to be preaching as he held a book in his left hand, according to those who witnessed the vision.
An inquiry into the apparitions was established the following October by Archbishop of Tuam John McHale. The enquiry was comprised of three parish priests, including parish priest of Knock, Archdeacon Bartholemew Cavanagh, along with six curates.
All 15 witnesses who were interviewed were deemed to be “trustworthy and satisfactory” and the enquiry found no explanation of the apparitions from natural causes. It also dismissed suggestions that fraud could have been involved.
The first recorded cure at Knock took place just 12 days after the apparition – when a deaf person recovered their hearing. By October 1880, just over one year on from the apparition, 637 cures had been recorded by Archdeacon Cavanagh.
56 years later, in 1935, a second Commission of Enquiry into the Apparition and the cures attributed to Our Lady of Knock at the Shrine was set up by Rev. Dr. Thomas Patrick Gilmartin, Archbishop of Tuam.
During the enquiry, all evidence was taken under oath, and a total of 15 sessions took place between 24 August 1935 and 14 April 1936. The Commission examined the two surviving witnesses of the apparition living in Knock. They were Mary O’Connell (née Byrne, 86 years old) and Patrick Byrne, (71 years old).
On 27 January 1936, Mary Byrne made a sworn statement before a Commissioner of Oaths and Canon Grealy, then parish priest of Knock.
“I am quite clear about everything I have said. I make this statement knowing I am going before my God,” she said.
As part of the same Commission, a special Tribunal was established by the Archbishop of New York, as requested by the Tuam Archdiocese. This was to formally question the final living witness, John Curry, who was by this stage resident in New York, about the 1879 Apparition.
John Curry was aged five when the Apparition happened. The child was lifted up by fellow witness, Patrick Hill so that he could see the vision. In their final report of the 1936 Commission, the judges again stated that all the witnesses they had examined were found to be “upright” and their testimonies were “satisfactory”. They said that Mary Byrne, in particular, had left “a most favourable impression” on their minds.
Knock is one of the few Marian shrines across the world to have been visited by two Popes; Saint Pope John Paul II visited Knock in 1979 to mark the centenary of the apparitions, while Pope Francis paid a visit to the shrine in August 2018. Saint Teresa of Calcutta is another notable visitor to the shrine, visiting there in June 1993.
“Here I am at the goal of my journey to Ireland: the shrine of Our Lady of Knock,” Pope John Paul II declared when he arrived there on 30 September, 1979. During his visit there “as a pilgrim”, His Holiness raised the newly constructed church to the status of a Basilica of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland. After kneeling in prayer at the Apparition gable, the Polish Pope then blessed the Apparition statuary and lit a candle for family prayer.
The Apparition is unique, particularly because of the sense of profound mystery that arose from Knock being a silent Apparition. The meaning behind Our Lady’s appearance was deeply significant for the downtrodden, suffering, struggling people of Ireland, and Our Lady’s presence was a major source of consolation. In turn Knock became Ireland’s most famous and popular place of pilgrimage.
In September 2019, the Catholic Church officially recognised for the first time that a pilgrim was healed at Knock. Marion Carroll, a mother in her late thirties. visited the National Marian Shrine in 1989, when she was brought on a stretcher on the annual pilgrimage as part of the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise.
Now a grandmother, the Athlone native had suffered from the debilitating illness, believed to be multiple sclerosis, for 17 years when she visited Knock and her life was changed forever. At the time of the visit, the mother of two was at death’s door. She was in a wheelchair, incontinent, blind in one eye and partially sighted.
Recalling her healing in the book ‘My Miracle Cure,’ she said she was plagued by low self-esteem, and her speech was severely affected, caused by her long-standing illness. She has detailed how she asked Our Lady of Knock to intercede while visiting the statue of Our Lady, and her health was transformed.
Speaking in 2019, Bishop Duffy said: “On that special day, Marion recalled the key moment during Benediction and Blessing of the Sick: ‘It was at that time I got this magnificent feeling – a wonderful sensation like a whispering breeze telling me that I was cured. I got this beautiful, magnificent feeling telling me that if the stretcher was opened, I could get up and walk’.”
Many other healings have been reported at the Shrine, which draws almost two million visitors every year.