RELIGION: DUMBARTON-BASED PRIEST BUILT THE BASILICA AT KNOCK, COUNTY MAYO

Editors’ Note

Sacred space

Visitors to Mayo invariably speak of the weather, and never in flattering terms. Austen Ivereigh was at it in his View from Knock in the paper this week, unable to resist talk of “the wet west of Ireland”. When Our Lady appeared at the windswept gable of Knock’s parish church one August evening in 1879, people ran to tell each other, including the parish priest, but he wouldn’t budge from the presbytery after a long wet day, and missed her. The fifteen who left their turf fires to witness the apparition reported that, while it was raining very heavily at the time, no rain fell where they saw the figures of Our Lady, St Joseph and John the Evangelist.

Austen had been invited to preach in Knock’s magnificent basilica [the man who raised £millions to build the basilica and later the airport at Knock was Monsignor James Horan, one time assistant priest to Monsignor Hugh Kelly at St Patrick’s, Dumbarton, pictured below left with Saint John Paul II] on the first day of the shrine’s mid-August National Novena, a nine-day festival of liturgies and talks that takes in both the Feast of the Assumption and the anniversary of the apparition.

The other speaker-preachers included a religious sister and four other lay women. Austen, of course, saw a link to the synod process. The report from last October’s first session of the Synod [in England] suggests that the ministry of lector could expand to “a fuller ministry of the Word of God, which, in appropriate contexts, could also include preaching”. It was his first visit to Knock, and he was bowled over. “Not just by its calm, the warmth of the crowds, and the spirit of communion, but by its vision. Its rector, Fr Richard Gibbons, has set it firmly facing the future. His idea is that should the rest of the Church in Ireland disappear, it could be reborn from Knock, which has spiritual antennae galore.”

I briefly brushed against those antennae myself this week, when I stopped at the shrine for a few hours. There is an enviable poise between tradition and innovation, confessions, votive candles and Mass cards as well as counselling services, halogen lights and contactless donation devices. “Ireland is the most forward-looking Church in these islands,” Austen writes. There is certainly more to Irish Catholicism than a stubborn blocking of the ears against the disagreeable murmurs of modernity (though there is a trace of that).

My father loved Knock and would never leave without having had his confession heard. Mum once recalled others waiting in the queue behind him impatiently tapping their watches, speculating at what intransigent stains on his soul might need such an extended scouring. He explained later to my embarrassed mother that the young priest, not long ordained, on learning that his penitent was a doctor had begun to describe detailed symptoms that Dad began to recognise as early signs of cancer. He refused absolution until he had secured a promise that his confessor would make an appointment with his GP.

On the morning of my visit, it was, I am bound to record in the interests of that tradition of fair and balanced reporting on which The Tablet’s reputation rests, pouring with rain.

Can the UK’s new government restore people’s faith in democracy, in public life and in government itself in spite of unpropitious economic circumstances and a resurgent populist right? Maybe – but first, writes veteran Westminster reporter Julia Langdon, in a feature in this week’s issue, things can only get worse.

In our leader column this weekend we look at the challenge facing an opposition in desperate search not only for a new leader but for a fresh definition and identity. Might there be an attractive space left vacant by Labour in a version of Conservatism with a Burkean feeling for the common good that both respects personal freedom and demands solidarity, and rejects the extremes of economic and cultural liberalism?

We are rapidly populating our world with new creatures like robots and AI that disturb the boundaries between humans and non-humans. Are we on the cusp of some radical moral transformation? The American anthropologist Webb Keane reminds us that we have a long history of morally significant and sometimes fraught relations beyond the boundaries of the human: including interactions with near-human animals, quasi-human spirits, and superhuman or metahuman gods like Zeus, Odin, Krishna or Ogun. We have lived and loved on the edge of the human for longer than you might think.

In the final piece in our series on pilgrimage, retired GP Phil McCarthy celebrates the pilgrim routes he is helping establish in every Catholic diocese in England and Wales. He writes of his disappointment that at many of the Catholic churches on route he comes face to face with the “coldness of a closed door”.

Lavinia Byrne and Jane McBride reflect that if we pay attention we will find better insights into our relationships and everyday difficulties in the Bible than are proposed by many bestselling self-help books. Jon M. Sweeney confesses that he squirrelled away a biography of his hero into his luggage when he and his new wife left for London a few days after their wedding. One reader has emailed to tell me “Thomas Merton ruined my honeymoon” is the best headline he can remember seeing in The Tablet.

The Tablet religion magazine is on sale at weekends in good newsagents’ shops and church bookstalls.