Knock Shrine: Encyclopedia II - Knock Shrine - Cultural context

Knock Shrine - Cultural context

Subsequent sociologists, while neither accepting nor disputing what had allegedly occurred, but seeking to understand its cultural context, noted the timing of the events: how as at Lourdes and Fatima the "visitations" occurred at a time of immense cultural, social and economic change, and occurred to people whose traditional society was under threat from dramatic change. In the 1870s, Ireland was undergoing a period of dramatic upheaval. Some parts of the island had experienced the last waves of what proved to be a minor Famine but which nevertheless brought back memories of the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s that had decimated the countryside.

The appearance of railways brought new travel opportunities and challenges to closeknit communities, while the 1870s saw the beginnings of land reform that would change Irish rural life, reform initially fought for through mass mobilisation and sometimes violence with organisations like Michael Davitt's Land League and through the radical political leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. (The infamous Land Agent Captain Boycott, whose communal ostracisation on account of his treatment of local tenantry in the late 1870s became a worldwide cause celebré and which gave the English language the verb to boycott meaning "to ostracise completely", was based in County Mayo only a few mile from Knock.) In a time of change, symbols like the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph (known together within Catholicism as the Holy Family) marked a reminder of stability and tradition in a society whose change many people found bewildering. Depending on whether one accepted the validity of the apparation or the religious beliefs underpinning it, it could be seen either as a delusion by a marginalised traditional society clinging to old certainties, or, in a Catholic religious context, the appearance of the "Mother of God" to people marginalised by society to show her support and offer her comfort.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Cultural context", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki