Knock Shrine
| Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Knock, Queen of Ireland | |
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| Location | Knock, County Mayo |
| Country | Republic of Ireland |
| Denomination | Roman Catholic Latin Rite |
| Website | http://www.knock-shrine.ie/ |
Knock Shrine (Irish: Cnoc Mhuire, "Hill of Mary" or "Mary's Hill") is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site and National Shrine in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland, where observers stated that there was an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, angels, and Jesus Christ (the Lamb of God) in 1879.
As at Lourdes and Fatima the visitations occurred at a time of immense cultural, social and economic change, and occurred to people whose traditional society was under threat from social change. In the 1870s, Ireland was experiencing a period of upheaval. Some parts of the island had experienced what proved to be the last waves of a famine. This brought back memories of the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s that had decimated the countryside. Poverty, unemployment, evictions and emigration were not uncommon.
The appearance of railways brought new travel opportunities and challenges to close-knit communities, while the 1870s saw the beginnings of land reform that would change Irish rural life, reform initially fought for through mass mobilisation and sometimes violence in the Land War, led by organisations like Michael Davitt's Land League and through the radical political leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. The land agent Captain Boycott, who was ostracised in 1880 on account of seeking rents from tenant farmers during a rent strike, became a worldwide cause célèbre, so creating the verb to boycott meaning "to ostracise completely", was also based in County Mayo. In a time of change, symbols like the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph (known together within Catholicism as the Holy Family) marked a reminder of stability and tradition in a society whose change many people found bewildering. Depending on whether one accepted the veracity of the accounts of apparition or the religious beliefs underpinning it, it could be seen either as a delusion by a marginalised traditional society clinging to old certainties, or, in a Catholic religious context, the appearance of the "Mother of God" to people marginalised by society to show her support and offer her comfort.
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