Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (review)

According to published accounts of the event, on 21 August 1879 in the rural village of Knock, County Mayo, for about two hours beginning at seven thirty in the evening, a group of villagers saw a tableau of heavenly personages under the gable of the parish church. The Virgin Mary was flanked on her right by St. Joseph and on her left by St. John the Evangelist, next to whom was an altar on which stood a cross and a lamb. None of the figures spoke. Quickly framed as an apparition of the Virgin Mary, this event has held the religious imaginations of Marian devotees for more than a hundred and thirty years. Thanks in part to the nearby international airport and papal visits, Knock is today a major pilgrimage destination for both Irish Catholics and Roman Catholics worldwide. This deceptively simple, silent apparition has recently captured the attention of scholars of popular culture and religion; indeed it makes an excellent case study for exploring the social construction of religious experience. In this remarkable study of the apparition, Eugene Hynes not only provides an impressive array of historical data to establish the local culture of Knock, but also examines the means by which the experiences of the seers were transformed into a Marian apparition.

Hynes appropriately observes that social scientists are not in a position to determine whether supernatural persons such as the Virgin Mary can actually appear in this world; rather, their task is to determine the social circumstances and processes that establish the credibility or lack thereof to claims of encounters with the sacred. Beginning with the published accounts of the apparition and accounts of the seers' testimonies before the investigating commission, Hynes works back to the oral culture and local world that precipitated the event.

According to Hynes, by the summer of 1879 much of western Ireland, including the village of Knock, was experiencing considerable change in established patterns of social interaction, especially in relation to authoritarian figures like landlords and clergy. Anxiety was building among the populace over a fear of rising rents and impending famine. In Knock, tensions between the laity and clergy became particularly intense when the parish priest, Bartholomew Cavanagh, criticized the land agitation movement and was perceived as shielding certain landlords who were not sympathetic to the demands of their tenants. Hynes presents a compelling picture of the tensions between Cavanagh and his parishioners, including the details of a major demonstration against him in June of 1879. This tension is crucial to understanding the social context of the apparition, since a major traditional function of Marian appearances was to comment on the proper behavior of priests. Sometimes the narratives reinforce clerical authority; sometimes they criticize individual priests for failing to fulfill their responsibilities; sometimes they suggest that when the behavior of priests is inappropriate, heaven in the person of the Blessed Virgin will intervene. At Knock, according to Hynes, this crisis in clerical authority occasioned by landlord/tenant disputes precipitated the apparition, and was understood by many local people as a criticism of priests who fail to protect their parishioners in confrontations with exploitive landlords. But as the narrative of the apparition was framed and refined by local clergy and journalists for presentation to a wider public, the local world was neglected in favor of a coherent narrative replete with details underlining its miraculous nature.

Perhaps most impressive here is Hynes's careful reading of the seers' testimonies before the investigating commission for clues to the process of oral transmission that began to recast their experiences into a narrative. The commission was convened some six weeks after the event; by that time, those who had been at the parish church had already discussed and refined their interpretation and understanding of their experience. Indeed, Hynes notes, this process began at the church gable, where the seers conversed with each other and shared opinions about...