It all started in the small village of Knock, in the north of Ireland in 1879, in County Mayo. At that time, Margaret Beirne and her family lived about 200 meters from the parish church of Knock, on the road leading to it. Every evening, this brave Irish mother went there to lock the doors. On this vigil in August 1879, Margaret Beirne did not pay too much attention to what seemed to her to be a vague light above the church.
Her daughter Mary, however, was intrigued; in the company of the housekeeper of the parish priest, she approached the church and thought she saw the statues outside moving: “It’s not the statues, she exclaimed, it’s moving, it’s the blessed Virgin”. She rushed home, told her mother Margaret and father Dominic this startling fact that about 15 people had also noticed.
This is how the devotion to Our Lady of Knock, in the Irish county of Mayo, became an international shrine. Upon his appointment in 1949 as parish priest of St-Malachy by the Archbishop of the Diocese of Ottawa, Father Clément Braceland went on pilgrimage to the ancestral country.
The young and dynamic parish priest returned with an unwavering will: to build in the heart of his Canadian parish a replica of the famous sanctuary in Ireland. He commissioned architect Bruno Ducheski from Ottawa, where Pastor Braceland was born, to draw up the initial plans
On August 15, 1955, during the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Bishop M.-J. Lemieux came from Ottawa to bless the Mayo “Our Lady of Knock” sanctuary. Since then, on the Sunday closest to the celebration of the Assumption, this Irish sanctuary on Canadian and Quebec soil has welcomed pilgrims who come to pray Our Lady of Knock.
(Translated from a text from Mayo 1864-1989 – Les Éditions de la Petite-Nation inc. – M. Jacques Lamarche)
