Moving statues and concrete thinking

Abstract

In the early months of 1985 the Irish press reported a spate of Marian apparitions \nthat came to be known as the ‘moving statues’. The apparitions of 1985 were the most \nrecent in an intermittent history of similar phenomenon stretching back at least as \nfar as the late nineteenth century when, in the summer of 1879, the most famous of \nall Irish apparitions occurred in the remote village of Knock. There was a somewhat \nless famous episode during the Irish War of Independence when a household statue of \nthe Virgin Mary was said to have shed blood. There was another well-known episode \nin Northern Ireland in the ‘Marian year’ of 1954. While the 1980s apparitions took \nvarious forms and involved a range of saints and other divine beings, the majority and \nthe most famous of them were centered on or revolved around statues of the Blessed \nVirgin Mary, the Mother of God. Many of the statues were located in the hundreds of \noutdoor grottoes that were built all around Ireland after Pope Pius XII marked the \ncentenary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption by designating \n1954 a special ‘Marian Year’. This record would suggest that Marian apparitions were \nrelatively rare events, but it should be remembered that these were only the ones that \nthe relatively small Irish media industry of the time picked up on.

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