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Tue 11 Nov 2008Analysis of 19th-century devotion in which all is not as it appears
BOOK OF THE DAY: Dáire Keoghreviews Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century IrelandBy Eugene Hynes, Cork University Press, 368 pp, € 49
ON A wet night in August 1879, 15 locals witnessed an apparition against the gable wall of their parish church in Knock, Co Mayo. A subsequent clerical investigation identified the supernatural visitors as the Virgin, St Joseph and John the Evangelist. Today, Knock is numbered among the world's pre-eminent Marian sanctuaries, attracting 1½ million pilgrims annually. Few of the devotees, however, are aware of the turbulent setting in which the apparition occurred or the sense in which it challenged so much of what is accepted as traditional Irish Catholicism.
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