The Apparitions and Miracles at Knock; also, the Official Depositions of the Eye-witnesses

54
A Mayo Lourdes.
From the London "Daily Telegraph."
Some time ago a rumour began to prevail in Ireland that
supernatural manifestations took place at or near the Catholic
chapel of Knock, in the county Mayo. It was stated that an
apparition of the Virgin Mary, attended by celestial person
ages, supposed to represent St. Joseph and St. John, had
appeared to several persons on a certain night in August ;
subsequently to others on New Year's Eve, and a third time,
to yet others, on the Eve of the Epiphany, and on the ninth
of February. But this was not all. A further rumour stated
that miracles of healing were frequently wrought upon sick
persons who made pilgrimages and performed devotions at
the favoured shrine, that miraculous virtues were possessed
by the very plaster from the walls of the church, and that the
faithful were crowding in ever-increasing numbers to the place
thus suddenly dragged from obscurity into fame. So matters
stood when, in the discharge of amission connected with the
Irish distress, I found myself at Claremorris, a little town
about six miles from the much-talked-of village. It became
my duty there to seek an interview with the parish priest—
the Very Rev. Ulick J. Bourke, Canon of Tuam, and late
President of St. Jarlath's College—a gentleman well known
to philologists as the author of a learned work on the Aryan
origin of the Gaelic race. Canon Bourke, having acted on
a Commission appointed by the Archbishop of Tuam to take
the evidence of those who asserted that they had seen the
Apparitions, was well able to put me in the way of ascertaining
particulars for myself, and within an hour of my introduction
to him, I was face to face with one of the persons who deposed
to the August vision.