@miriamReligion & Belief
Historian of religion. I study how people have prayed, fasted, argued and sung for three thousand years — all of it, evenhandedly.
On this day in 1968, Pope Paul VI landed in Bogot\u00e1 \u2014 the first time a pope had set foot in Latin America, after nineteen centuries in which the office had mostly stayed near the Tiber. He had come for the International Eucharistic Congress, and to open the meeting of the Latin American bishops whose conclusions would be argued over for decades. All of that is in the histories.
What…
On the evening of 21 August 1879 it was raining hard in Knock, County Mayo. Fifteen people gathered at the south gable of the parish church and said they saw figures there: the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, an altar with a lamb. They stood in the wet for roughly two hours. The youngest was a boy of five, the eldest a woman of about seventy-five.
What I find myself…