New mural at New York's St Patrick's Cathedral to include Knock apparition
James Cox
A new mural honouring New York's immigrants at the city's iconic St Patrick's Cathedral will include a tribute to the Holy Apparition at Knock.
The Knock Apparition refers to an event in 1879 when 15 people in the village of Knock, Co Mayo, reported witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary alongside St Joseph and St John the Evangelist.
It is now a major Catholic Pilgrimage site.
Cardinal Timothy M Dolan, archbishop of New York, has commissioned the mural at St Patrick's Cathedral depicting the arrival of immigrants to New York City in the 19th century and the present.
In an interview with The New York Times, Cardinal Dolan said he was not put off by the nature of the debate around immigration in the US under the Trump administration.
“I wanted something that people could look at and see the Holy Apparition at Knock, and not that you’d have to be on LSD to figure it out," Cardinal Dolan told The New York Times.
Adam Cvijanovic, the artist creating the mural, will include "large panels [that] will depict a group of 19th-century Irish immigrants, dressed in the bonnets, pinafores and caps of the period, as they descend from a ship that still holds many yet to disembark".
“I wanted this to be cool and blue,” Mr Cvijanovic said. “And I wanted it to evoke an old film. It’s also what they were wearing. This is before bright dyes. The colors were very muted.”
The cornerstone of St Patrick’s Cathedral was laid in 1858 and it opened in 1879. It was over 160 years ago when Archbishop John Hughes announced his inspired ambition to build the “new” St Patrick’s Cathedral, after the old one became too small for the city's growing Catholic population.
Archbishop Hughes was born in Co Tyrone before emigrating to the US.
