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was inside. Gently I put Jack back into his resting place and let the lid down slowly.
    “What are you doing in there?” Frances called nervously.
    I gave a last look around the tomb before coming briskly up the steps.
    “God, I’m glad that’s over!” I said.
    We pushed in the heavy iron door and shot therusty bolt.
    “I’m sure that he is in the right place,” I said positively.
    “We can’t be sure of that until the day of general judgement,” Frances pronounced ponderously. “If a guy comes out of here with two heads and another with no head at all, then you have made a mistake. If they are all intact, then the job was oxo!”
    That night I wrote to the worried medical student. I never again heard from him and I hope that he never again heard from Jack.

H OLY B UNS
    T HE S T J OSEPH’S Young Priest Society were in Knock that day. I stood and watched the procession pour out of the basilica. Wave after wave of people carrying banners representing parishes from all over Ireland. They were like a mountain stream that came on and on. Men with office faces, factory faces, drivers’ faces and men with farm faces. Women with designer clothes, boutique clothes and chain store clothes. People from different ends of the parish social ladder and off all the rungs up along as well. As I watched them the thought came into my mind that these people were as constant as the Northern star and as indestructible in their ways as the Mayo rocks around them. Then came the bishops, priests and altar boys in white surplices. They frothed out of the basilica like milk out of a bucket. I looked well at the nuns in their religious habits, observing closely an endangered species.
    All these people blended together in a sea of technicolour religion, while thirsty children in their best clothes swung off praying mothers, as theydemanded crisps and minerals. This was the public face of Knock. For many of them it was an annual pilgrimage and one of their summer outings. The car parks were lined with buses that had left country parishes all over Ireland before the dawn had broken. Driving along the quiet early morning roads they had said fifteen decades of the rosary and sung hymns to Our Lady.
    It is devotion to Our Lady that draws them all here, because this more than anywhere else in Ireland is her place. She appeared here on the gable end of the church with St John and St Joseph in 1879, and since then the people of rural Ireland have made this their place of pilgrimage to her. She is “at home” to them here because this barren corner of Mayo is like many country parishes and poorer than a lot of them. The Queen of Heaven who would visit here is approachable rather than regal. They tell a story in Knock that Monsignor Horan rang up heaven to ask God to open his airport, and when God refused, he was asked to send his mother. God said, “She’ll be delighted to come, because she was never there before.” But they know in Knock that God was only codding!
    They tell another story about a local beggar woman who, shortly after the apparition had taken place, called to the parish priest who was always very generous to her. The following day she called to his not so generous brother who was parish priest in the next parish, but he turned her from the doorempty handed. As she left she shouted back at him from the garden gate, “No wonder Our Lady never appeared on your gable end!”
    The atmosphere at Knock on that sunny summer’s day was a mixture of a parish carnival and a country station. The children obviously came for the day out and had a great time buying holy bric-a-brac in the various shops which satisfied all kinds of religious fervour. Many of the adults, however, performed their pilgrimage duties with great attention to detail: having made the Stations of the Cross, they then said the fifteen decades of the rosary around the church, some silently and others in groups.
    Some of the people who came were in the need of extra