Archdeacon Bartholomew Cavanagh died in the Hostel now known as St Mary’s on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8th December 1897.    He himself had this Hostel erected for pilgrims and retreatants.    The room in which he died is now the Hostel Chapel.

He was laid to rest within the Parish Church, in the Western transept, fronting what is today Our Lady’s Altar in the right-side aisle.    A marble memorial tablet to his memory was placed above his burial place on the Western wall.    Inscribed upon it is a glowing tribute from his parishioners.

The best tribute paid to the Archdeacon was by that of his past curate, the late Monsignor McAlpine who put on record a remarkable tribute to his holiness and priestly qualities for the Lamp newspaper:

“On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception last year (1897) there passed away one of the most remarkable and in a sense, the most conspicuous figure among Irish ecclesiastics.   A man of extraordinary piety, self-sacrifice, zeal and generosity.    The Venerable Archdeacon Cavanagh has been mourned by the thousands who knew and esteemed him.    He passed from the scene of many strange events on the day when, perhaps, he was desirous that all that was mortal of him should cease to live and yielding up the ghost must have been to him a singularly easy transition from one sphere to another, for he had lived a life of wonderful austerity and devotion.

The pastor of Our Lady’s Shrine at Knock was noted for one peculiar system of devotion-that of the Immaculate Mother- and for that devotion he lived and worked and made his mission here one ceaseless effort at diffusing the glories of Mary and the eternal wisdom of her Son.

He had that strange and rare temperament sometimes to be found among the old school of Irish priests, in which all that was intensely spiritual was developed to a high degree, frequently distinguishing his character for all that is genuinely pious above the heads of his brethren.   To take him away from the piety to which he had devoted his whole life would have been to separate one ingredient from another to the total destruction of both.   One element was profound absorbing spirituality, the other a consuming overwhelming charity to all men, a boundless system of generosity, strange, peculiar and even weird in its extraordinary method.

We can only judge a man by his actions and by his most essential characteristics and those of the Archdeacon were the powerful antithesis of all that is unspiritual and ungenerous.   But it is needless to dwell upon a point in character which to those who knew him was the most conspicuous and apparently the most unstudied.

To write a resume of such a life would require nothing but the record of years of devotion to the one common purpose for which he aimed, struggled, fought and finally won.

The lamented Archdeacon passed away at Knock where since 1867 he spent his life.   It has been said that he had no banking account which was true enough for he never had anything to put into one.   All that he ever had went to the poor and although he was often well supplied with money from various sources he spread it amongst his poor with a free hand and a beneficent disposal discreet but generous.    He was in many ways like a Cure d’Ars and like him he was spontaneous in his actions of goodness, prayer and almsgiving. He was indeed an ideal priest, a man of great force of character and spiritual superiority”.