Our Lady of Knock: Reflections of a Believing Anthropologist

Late on the rainy evening on August 21, 1879, a vision of a lady and two saints appeared at the back of Knock church in the presence of fifteen villagers.¹ These figures, bathed in light, remained for two hours without speaking and then disappeared.² The religious excitement that arose from this event became widespread among the Irish people. Even today, one can elicit a response to the placename “Knock” from almost any Irish person throughout the world—yet to those with no experience of Irish Catholicism, the name is meaningless.

The story of Knock is about people who, in socioeconomic terms, stood among the lowest of the low. It is also a story of people who claimed to have experienced an event that would make rationalists embarrassed or angry. Inevitably, the story has meant little or nothing to academic researchers, at least until recently.³

Now, a new approach to the study of Knock, which ought to be of profound interest to women scholars of religion, has become possible in a new atmosphere. A particularly important methodology appears in the work of “radical empiricist” researchers. This approach entails the willing suspension of disbelief for the sake of gleaning the sense received by the participants themselves; this often results in a spiritual experience of certainty for the researcher. These researchers are becoming numerous among anthropologists: Jill Dubisch, George Mentore, Steven Friedson, Ter Ellingson, Duncan Earle, Suchitra Samantha, and many more.

By means of this approach to fieldwork, we see how, at Knock, women pilgrims (and some men, such as James Greenan who is quoted at length below) have developed their own kind of spirituality, a spirituality that the priests at the shrine, and the patriarchy of the church more generally, have often failed to understand. Elsewhere, I have detailed a string of suppressions of the Lady cultus at Knock, and argued that the shunting-aside of the Marian element is indeed a consequence of institutional patriarchy.⁴ These suppressions have ranged from preventing the people from the practice of receiving a blessing by touching the stone of the gable with their rosary crosses, to much more substantial interventions in the story itself. Consistently, these interventions have downplayed or even usurped the central position of Our Blessed Mother at Knock. Yet Knock shares something fundamental about human—and especially women’s—experience of transcendent power with numerous other times, places, and traditions.⁵ Almost everywhere in the domain, the role of the Lady has literally been altered and set on one side. For instance, in the booklet describing the vision that the keepers of the shrine now make available to visiting pilgrims, Mary has been shifted to the end of the text and her image appears only on the back of the cover. The central statue of Our Lady was replaced with one of Christ as the Lamb of God. The priests in charge of the site introduced a picture shrine that likewise diminished the healing and intercessory role of Mary. In an Orwellian fashion, they have radically redirected the interpretation—and at times, falsified the history—of the Lady’s appearance in 1879.

At Knock, there has been one notable exception to the systematic exclusion of a woman-oriented spirituality, which was for a time seen inside the original stone church. There, a statue of the Lady of Knock was placed in the very sanctuary of the church, in a semi-enclosed space in front of the altar. Thereafter, the area had an atmosphere of the most extraordinary comfort and blessing. Because the people had been prevented from touching the stone of the apparition in its original place, in a further obstinate statement of love and veneration for Our Lady they marked pews with crosses inside the old church.

There is a depth in pilgrimage—and particularly in Marian pilgrimage—that needs more than social science research to reach. This, of course, is because religion is involved. The language of Western modernist theory is not useful for reaching the heart of a Marian pilgrimage, nor the mood of the people, nor...