Friday, August 17, 2018

Papal Notes - Lady of Knock

And when they say to you, “Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?
Isaiah 8:19

"..... during his 32-hour trip to Ireland, Pope Francis will come knock, knock, knockin’ on Mary’s door.

He’ll be traveling to the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock on Aug. 26, where tradition has it that on August 21, 1879, the Virgin Mary joined by St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist and Christ himself, represented as the Lamb of God, all appeared.
Though skeptics might be prone to reduce that belief to just another Irish folk-tale, some 1.5 million yearly pilgrims believe, with the Vatican’s stamp of approval, that it’s all real.
In the century and a half since the apparition, this small town in the north-western part of Ireland, nestled amidst the national highlands once evangelized by St. Patrick, has become the Marian heart of “Catholic Ireland.”
Musing on the faith of the Irish during his visit to the shrine back in 1979, St. John Paul II said that “better than any literary source, it is the constant and deeply rooted devotion to Mary that testifies to the success of evangelization by St. Patrick, who brought you the Catholic faith in all its fullness.”

....Father Richard Gibbons, the local parish priest. Speaking with Crux on Wednesday, he said that this idea can be explained by the nature of the apparition, which is “very sophisticated.” It’s not only a Marian apparition, he said, but a Eucharistic one, with the Virgin and St. Joseph reportedly appearing together with an altar, the Lamb of God and several saints."
CRUX