I travelled to Paris for a work trip earlier this month and, from there, I was a stone’s throw away from Ireland. I spent two days visiting my cousin and her family, who have lived there for over three years. They took me to visit a very special place in Ireland called Knock. We had the wonderful opportunity of making a pilgrimage to the most profound Shrine of Our Lady of Knock.
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| Apparition Chapel, 9 May 2026 |
The Basilica of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland, and its surroundings are home to the Shrine of Our Lady at Knock in Cnoc Mhuire, Ireland. This is the official account listed on the Shrine site:
“On 21 August 1879, 15 people of varying ages witnessed, over a period of two hours, the apparition of Our Lady, St Joseph and St John the Evangelist on the gable of the Church. To the right, in the centre of the gable, was a plain altar on which stood a lamb. Behind the lamb a large cross stood upright. Angels hovered around the lamb for the duration of the apparition, which was enveloped in a heavenly light. Two official Church Commissions of Enquiry, one in 1879 and the second in 1936, found that ‘the testimony of the witnesses, taken as a whole, was trustworthy and satisfactory’.”
The Shrine site has four beautiful chapels, one of them marking the original place where the account of the apparition took place, and finally a beautiful basilica with a huge mosaic piece, made of 1.5 million pieces of coloured glass, capturing that day in 1879 so vividly.
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| Mosaic piece of the Apparition, 9 May 2026 |
You might ask: why do we have shrines dedicated to Mary? Why give her such importance? Surely, we should reserve the importance for Our Lord.
Well, every chapel indeed honours Our Lord, who resides in the Tabernacle, and so He remains the summit and pinnacle of the entire site. However, Mary is not just a mother; she is the Mother of God. In this blog, I barely scratch the surface in trying to explain why she deserves such importance, but I hope there is enough here to deflect the common misconceptions often pointed at Catholics.
Mary participates in a special way with the Holy Trinity, something we might easily overlook. God the Father and God the Son are united through God the Holy Spirit. We believe and “worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity” (Athanasian Creed). There is a fancy word for the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, and it is the hypostatic union.
The previous paragraph is a heavy one, as this can be so hard for us to comprehend. However, let us pause for a moment and contemplate this truth in the words of St John’s Gospel:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father.”
John 1:1; 1:10; 1:14
God sits outside of all creation. He is the Creator of all living beings and all of creation. Mary, a creature created by God, is also a daughter of God. At the same time, the Son of God, Jesus, entered the world through Mary by passing through her blessed and pure womb. She conceived Jesus, not through marital love with St Joseph, but through the indwelling and gift of the Holy Spirit, her true spouse, who also bonds God the Father and God the Son.
This is why Mary is known as the New Eve. She restored within us that echo of the Garden of Eden before sin entered the world: that we have been created by and for God. We find communion with each other by the nature of our souls being created to rest in God.
Hence, I say in this blog that I do not intend even to scratch the surface of trying to explain why Mary deserves such a special place in our hearts and in the Church. There is a wealth of information on this from the Doctors of the Church. But what we cannot deny is the fact that Mary’s role in the redemption of you and me, and of all mankind, is mysteriously linked to the fact that she entered into participating in, with and through the Holy Trinity.
Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses and the many prophets who followed were special, as they strove to love God and, through their obedience, became participants in bringing us God’s word and truth. However, Mary sits in a whole class of her own.
Her obedience and faithfulness led her not only to hear God’s message, but to carry the Son of God in her womb for nine months. She got to nurse the Son of God. She dressed and bathed the Son of God. She taught and loved the Son of God. She asked the Son of God, with all tenderness, to listen to her plea to transform water into wine at the wedding of Cana. Finally, she witnessed the Son of God die a torturous death on the Cross, and she held the Son of God in her arms one last time, battered and lifeless, before laying Him in the tomb.
Now, there is no other who has walked this earth, besides Our Lord, who is as great as Our Mother Mary. Don’t we honour the legacy of Nelson Mandela through casting memorial statues and retelling the good he did for the freedom of all South Africans in museums?
In Our Lord’s first miracle at the wedding of Cana, we see the clearest example of the role she plays in our lives as believers. The wedding party was in distress because they had run out of wine. Keep in mind that the wedding feast celebration could be a week-long festivity, and it would surely have brought a lot of shame and scandal on the couple. The gossip would soon spread like wildfire, damaging the joy between the newlywed couple.
Mary, human like us, understood this, and she took the couple’s concern — it almost sounds like a prayer petition — straight to her Son and asked Him to please do something about it, if He willed it. Prayer is reserved for God, as we can only pray to God. But the detail is so simple, yet so powerful.
Did the couple pray to Mary? No. Did they raise Mary to the status of a god? No. They simply had their need brought to her Son because when our moms instruct, we listen, no matter how old we are. Mary is “Super Mom”; she has direct access to the Holy Trinity.
Now, back to the pilgrimage site of Knock. During the apparition, beside Mary stood St Joseph and St John. Now, if Mary is the Mother of God, we could argue that the greatest saints have to be those who were closest to Mary. However, we then get the special class of those who were physically close to Mary. They are the giants.
The great protector, St Joseph, said not a single word that we have documented, yet his actions have stood the test of time. St Joseph played the supporting role to Mary as her husband and father to Jesus.
However, if he had chosen to publicly divorce Mary when he found out she was pregnant, he could have ensured she was stoned to death. If he had chosen to stay comfortably in his workshop in Nazareth, not uproot his business and life, and hold onto his tools, he would have participated in helping Herod murder Jesus before He reached the age of two. He could have left Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem at the age of twelve, when he had missed the transport back home, allowing Jesus’ path to His public ministry to be shaped by the scribes and Pharisees before He had reached full maturity.
St Joseph is the greatest of all time — the G.O.A.T — when it comes to the saints, because he did so much but had zero interest in the fame and fortune that could have accompanied his role. In fact, it is the great humility of the Holy Family that raised Jesus, the Son of God, and there was no other fitting home.
“It makes me very happy to realize that Christ wanted to be fully a man, with flesh like our own. I am moved when I contemplate how wonderful it is for God to love with a man’s heart. Let us choose some events from the Gospel, beginning with Jesus’ relationships with the twelve. St John the Apostle, who pours into his narrative so much that is first-hand, tells of his first unforgettable conversation with Christ. ‘Master, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They went and saw where he was staying; and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour... The Gospels tell us that Jesus had no place to rest his head, but they also tell us that he had many good, close friends, eager to have him stay in their homes when he was in the vicinity. They tell us of his compassion for the sick, of his sorrow for those who were ignorant or in error, his anger at the money changers who profaned the temple; his heart was touched by the sorrow of the widow at Naim.”
Christ is Passing By, 108
The above passage from St Josemaria’s book, Christ is Passing By, brings us full circle to the role of St John. He is simply a placeholder for you and me, for all humanity. He was ordinary. He was in the company of the apostles who were reluctant to hang around the Samaritan people, so he judged others like we do. He got angry and wanted to rain down hail and brimstone upon a nation, so you could say he was irrational, just like us. Finally, he had the ambition to be prestigious and powerful: he wanted a seat with his brother at the right hand of God, driven by the same pride and desire to grasp at the unknown like us.
However, I would argue that the most repeated sentence describing St John is that he was known as “the one Jesus loved”. He went on to do great things and gave us the beauty of his Gospel.
St John was the last man standing and the only apostle at the foot of the Cross of Our Lord. It is in John’s direction that we see that no pope or theologian gave us an instruction, but rather it came directly from Our Lord:
“When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
John 19:26–27
God the Father raised Mary to the title Mother of God. The Son of God raised Mary to the title of Our Mother. Our Mother, through God the Spirit, is given a special place to keep being the Mother of John — that is, you and me — and she is waiting to take her children’s cry to her Son to redeem the world.
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