Knock

For other uses, see Knock (disambiguation)}}}.

Knock (An Cnoc in Irish, meaning The Hill – but now more generally known in Irish as Cnoc Mhuire, "Hill of (the Virgin) Mary") is a small town in County Mayo in Ireland where Catholics believe that on 21 August 1879 the Virgin Mary, together with St Joseph and St John the Evangelist, appeared to local people. In the 20th century it became one of Europe's major Roman Catholic Marian shrines, alongside Lourdes and Fatima. One and a half million pilgrims visit Knock Shrine annually. It was visited by Pope John Paul II, a supporter of devotion to the Virgin Mary, in 1979.

In the early 2000s, roadnames indicating Knock began carrying the Irish language translation An Cnoc instead of the commonly used name Cnoc Mhuire. The Irish Placenames Commission asserted that An Cnoc was more historically accurate; Knock is now outside of the Gaeltacht (the areas where Irish is spoken as a vernacular), but when the use of Irish was more widespread the town was referred to as An Cnoc. Since approximately the 1920s/1930s, though, the name Cnoc Mhuire has been used in devotion to the Virgin Mary. After the issue was discussed in the Dáil (the Irish parliament), it was agreed that the folk translation of Cnoc Mhuire would be used, but that the affair should not be used as a basis to make further unrestricted changes to Irish translations of placenames.

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