Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The Silent Apparition of Knock"

Knock (Ireland) (1879)

On the evening of Thursday, August 21, 1879, around eight o'clock, as darkness fell and a heavy rain fell, several residents of the village of Knock, in County Mayo, saw something extraordinary on the exterior wall of the south gable of the parish church. Enveloped in a brilliant light appeared the Virgin Mary, dressed in white with her hands raised in prayer; beside her was Saint Joseph, his head bowed toward her; and a figure wearing a mitre and liturgical vestments, identified as Saint John the Evangelist, holding a book. Next to them was a simple altar upon which was a lamb, and behind it, a large cross.

The apparition was completely silent: there was no message, no words, no request. Fifteen witnesses, men and women between the ages of five and seventy-four, watched it for about two hours.

The Church's response was careful. Six weeks later, the Archbishop of Tuam established a commission that questioned the fifteen witnesses separately and found their accounts consistent and reliable; a second commission, in 1936, reached the same conclusion with the visionaries still alive. The parish priest recorded hundreds of unexplained healings in a notebook in the following months, including that of a deaf girl named Delia. Knock is now Ireland's national Marian shrine, visited by Saint John Paul II in 1979.