Our Lady of Knock: A distinctive campus statue

If you have ever walked through the lobby of Bachmann, you’ve probably walked past a little statue of Mary that faces Morgan Circle. If you stopped a moment to read the plaque below, you would find it is a statue of Our Lady of Knock.

Our Lady of Knock is one of the many titles of Mary, the Mother of God. She appeared one night in Knock, Ireland, on August 21, 1879.

There were several eyewitness accounts to this visitation of the blessed mother. The description below, published in The Apparitions and Miracles at Knock by John Macphilpin (Forgotten Books 2017), summarizes the experience of the onlookers.

“...I live in Claremorris my aunt lives at Knock. I remember the 21st of August last; on that day I was drawing home turf or peat from the bog. While at my aunt’s at about 8 o clock in the evening, Dominick Beirne came into the house, he cried out, ‘Come up to the chapel and see the miraculous lights and the beautiful visions that are to be seen there’ … together we ran over towards the chapel ... we immediately beheld the lights, a clear white light covering most of the gable from the ground up to the window and higher. It was a kind of changing bright light going sometimes up high and again not so high. We saw the figures the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph and St. John and an altar with the Lamb on the altar and a cross behind the Lamb.”

According to these reports, she never spoke a word during the apparition but still comforted the people by her presence. Immediately after there was doubt about the validity of the vision of the Holy Mary, but years later the accounts stayed the same.

The feast day of Our Lady of Knock is August 17th, but Knock and Ireland celebrate the anniversary of the apparition as well. The parish at which she was seen exists currently as a shrine to the Holy Mary and hosts more than half a million visitors annually.

But on a campus with many statues that have obvious connections to the university (St. Francis of Assisi, St. John Neumann, Mother Mary Francis Bachmann), why is there one that commemorates a miraculous vision at a small Irish village?

The statue that lives at Neumann University was dedicated to the memory of Michael J. Noonan, the vice president for finance from 1999 to 2007, in honor of his devotion to Our Lady of Knock.