Knock Shrine - Cultural Context

Cultural Context

Subsequent sociologists, while neither accepting nor disputing what had allegedly occurred, but seeking to understand its cultural context,;* noted the timing of the events: how 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 dramatic change. In the 1870s, Ireland was undergoing a period of dramatic upheaval. Some parts of the island had experienced what proved to be the last waves of a famine but which nevertheless brought back memories of the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s that had decimated the countryside.

The appearance of railways brought new travel opportunities and challenges to closeknit 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 apparation 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.

A similar apparition reported by another teenaged girl at Lourdes, France, in 1858 had been well publicised across Ireland by 1879. In 1854, Pope Pius IX promulgated a bull proclaiming the feast of the Immaculate Conception for the Universal Church and brought a renewal in Marian devotion.

Visions linked to religious matters were not unknown in rural Irish faith communities, the members of which commenced to have solid religious formation. Primary education was in most cases founded and funded by local Catholics and had more doctrinal and rigorous religious content than the modern Irish primary school. The apparition story was published fifteen years before the different but equally remarkable case of Bridget Cleary.

An Irish anthropologist, Dr Peter Mulholland, took Mr Coleman's 'visions' and prophesies as a case study and 'Exploring a range of explanatory theories, he highlights the interaction of social context, family structure and the Catholic tradition in generating the kind of quotidian life experiences that have sustained “magical devotionalism” and facilitated the spread of New Age healing beliefs and practices' in modern Ireland.