THERE is a simple, old-hippy principle about tolerating other people's faith values: whatever gets you through the night.

It seems to me that this should be an abiding principle towards anyone's religious faith -- whatever gets you through the night. With the added coda -- providing it does no harm.

Aztec religion, which involved human sacrifice, clearly does not come into the category of liberal tolerance, despite all those pretty blue artefacts (and the modish fashion for revering anything "anti-colonial").

Of course, sometimes it is hard to qualify what, in every particular, may do harm, since anything and everything can be shown to have some harmful application, as well as a benign one: motor cars kill, wine causes liver damage, the sex drive can prompt rape and exploitation as well as pleasure, and the wonders of science have been put to nefarious causes as well as to worthy ones.

But, all other things being equal, it seems to me that "whatever gets you through the night" is still a good guiding principle. And the recent controversy over the Knock visionaries is very much a case in point.

If some people believe that the Blessed Virgin has been about to appear, or re-appear, at the shrine of Knock, is there any harm in tolerating their belief? Even if such persons are dupes, fools, hysterics or exhibitionists -- or are considered as such by others -- does it matter greatly?

Joe Coleman, one of the alleged visionaries, who said that he asked Our Lady to bring peace and reconciliation across the globe, might be said to have done a lot less harm to the public square than many bankers, economic advisers and politicians we might name.

Maybe he's imagining it all: but is peace and reconciliation across the globe such a malign aspiration to imagine?

Maybe it gets him through the night. Maybe the spirituality that Knock engenders gets a lot of people through the night. Maybe we would be afflicted by fewer lonely suicides or painful depressions if people could reach for a spiritual comfort which gets them through a dark night of the soul.

Knock has been a well-established Irish Marian shrine for 130 years. There are some people, even observant Catholics in the locality of Mayo itself, who are not wholly convinced that the Blessed Virgin ever did appear there in 1879. A local historian in Mayo told me that he believed the original visionaries of Knock were affected by hallucinations brought on by eating rotten potato skins during the mini-famines then affecting the West.

Yes, a wave of famines were passing through Connacht in the 1870s, a decade of serious economic depression all over Europe. Everyone seemed to be desperate to emigrate, preferably to America, but anywhere would do. One priest in the West reported that "penal service would be a paradise to many (poor people here) compared to their present condition -- slaves, drudges and paupers, not half-fed or half-clad". About 900 priests around the western seaboard actually got up a petition for assisted passages for emigrants, because conditions of life were so miserable.

But two things happened which, arguably, helped to lift people from their wretchedness. Parnell and Davitt founded the Land League, which brought about the rise of parliamentary politics. And within the same fortnight in August 1879, came the report of the Marian apparition at Knock.

Whether the events at Knock represented a genuinely heavenly message, or whether they were the work of a collective imagination, they got the people through that dark period of hunger and despair. It gave them hope, dignity, solidarity and a sense of self-worth -- the Blessed Virgin and St John had not forgotten them, and eventually a Pope would come to that little townland to pay his respects. (The faith that made Knock would also galvanise Monsignor Horgan to build an airport there, in the teeth of opposition from Dublin.)

I am not particularly drawn to Marian shrines, but I am always touched by the kindness, altruism, care and concern they so often bring out in many pilgrims. The atheist Jill Tweedie wrote that the miracle of Lourdes was the sheer sweetness and devotion to others she witnessed there. Ruth Harris, the Jewish scholar who wrote the definitive historical text on Lourdes, concluded that believer or non-believer must be impressed by the spiritual uplift of the experience.

When I once grumbled about the "tacky" element of souvenir markets around Lourdes to a friend who had cancer, she replied: "You have no idea how much they cheered me up." Even the "tackiness" may get some people through the night.

Significantly, the institutional Church itself opposed Lourdes for quite a long time, and it's not surprising that bishops have said the present goings-on at Knock are not authentic. The institutional Church is always wary of "folk religion", which indeed can get out of hand and become mass hysteria. And perhaps there is always an element of institutions wanting to control these phenomena.

Yet what harm if people derive comfort from what they believe to be a spiritual experience? Only a Gradgrind of the most austere school of "facts, facts, facts" would deny people such spiritual comfort.

And while Ireland is not exactly at the stage of misery, pauperhood and economic despair of 1879, maybe there is a message here just the same, heavenly or not. Maybe spiritual comfort is precisely what is needed when there is so much gloom and doom over the rest of the workaday landscape.

- Mary Kenny

Irish Independent