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MacPhilpin 1880, Google Books scan of Harvard copy

Internet Archive · 91 pages · text by GLM-OCR

This is an 1880 book, The Apparitions and Miracles at Knock, prepared and edited by John MacPhilpin of Tuam and published in Dublin by M. H. Gill and Son. The Internet Archive holds a Google scan of the Harvard College Library copy. It reprints Tuam News accounts and the official depositions of eye-witnesses to the apparition of 21 August 1879 on the sacristy gable of Knock Church, County Mayo. It argues that natural light could not have caused the apparition and lists cures recorded in Archdeacon Cavanagh's diary.

  • p. 14 …WHAT THE EYE-WITNESSES SAY—Testimonies of Patrick Hill, Mary M'Loughlin, Mary Beirne, Patrick Walsh…
  • p. 20 …In Gaelic, the name "Knock" signifies a hill. The village is surrounded by elevated knolls, which…
  • p. 21 …Looking, for instance, to the south-west, he beholds Cnoc-ban, or fair hill; and to…
  • p. 22 …A second Lourdes has arisen at Knock, a small village surrounded by little hills, from which…
  • p. 34 …but ancient-looking, buildings erected on the hill. He naturally asks: What is that? The site…
  • p. 41 …balls of the figures, which, as Patrick Hill testifies, appeared to him to be those of…
  • p. 44 …rightly due to the evidence of Patrick Hill, of Claremorris, a young, frank, intelligent boy, of…
  • p. 45 …Master Hill declares that they appeared to him to move, and, as it were, on wing…
  • p. 46 …I am Patrick Hill; I live in Claremorris; my aunt lives at Knock; I remember the…
  • p. 49 …myself; I went away then. (Signed) PATRICK HILL. Witness present—U. J. Canon Bourke. October 8th…
  • p. 51 …NOTE.—Mary M'Loughlin had gone away before Patrick Hill came. Their testimony relates to two…
  • p. 61 …The fifteenth witness is John Durkan, one of the three who accompanied young Hill. His testimony…
  • p. 65 …looked around the church and school, and hill and vale, mound and mearing, and saw no…
  • p. 70 …This was a boy of about fourteen years of age, named Patrick Hill—a bright, intelligent…
  • p. 71 this story in the manner already described, Hill departed, and presently a lad was brought in…

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

natural as well as in things natural, will pronounce, in a semi-dogmatic tone, that the apparition has been the effect of some natural cause unknown to man; or that all the witnesses who bear testimony to what they assert they saw, have in some way or other been themselves discovered. On the other hand, thousands of people, at home and abroad, will be convinced—as most persons who have visited the site have been convinced—that the Apparition was, in its appearance, a reality, objectively present to the gaze of the different persons who beheld it; and that it could not, by any possibility, have been produced by human agency.

## Opinions do not undo facts.

Whatever the views may be of those who read these pages, they in no way concern the editor of this pamphlet, which is simply a reproduction, in book form, of the facts that he has already published. One need not conceal the fact that the Tuam News was the medium through which the public learned, for the first time, the story now so well known regarding the Apparition seen at Knock on the 21st of August last. The correspondent of the Daily News, London, puts this point prominently forward in the issue of that journal, Saturday, 28th February, just passed. "Publicity," says he, "was first given to the alleged occurrence in the Tuam News of the 9th January, and then in a cautious, hesitating manner, accompanied by an intimation that the ecclesiastical authorities had up to that time pronounced no final opinion." Every child of Mother Church knows full well that she has been always, and at all times, cautious in giving her sanction to any new apparition or vision, or to any new devotion. She knows, in the words of Gamaliel, the Jewish doctor of the law, "that if this design or work be of men, it will fall to nothing; but if it be of God, you are not able to destroy it:" and time only will more strongly confirm its truth.

About this file

Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 91 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.