Knock’s youngest visionary to be reburied in New York cathedral

The remains of John Curry, youngest witness of the apparition at Knock, buried since 1943 in an unmarked grave on New York’s Long Island, are to be exhumed and buried in the cemetery of Manhattan’s St Patrick’s Old Cathedral.

Plans for the reinterment, scheduled for next spring, had their seeds in a lunchtime conversation between New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Knock’s rector Fr Richard Gibbons during a transatlantic pilgrimage to the Mayo shrine last August.

Fr Gibbons told The Irish Catholic that after explaining that Mr Curry was buried in an unmarked grave on Long Island, he said “if I organise for a proper headstone and marker for his grave would you bless it with me, and he said we’ll do better than that: we’ll take him into New York”. St Patrick’s Old Cathedral was a fitting spot for the burial, Fr Gibbons said, as it was home to one of the city’s oldest cemeteries.

Although Mr Curry’s grave was unmarked, it was possible to identify it owing to good record-keeping in the US and the burial being in a plot owned by the Little Sisters of the Poor with whom he lived in his final years.

Mr Curry was five years old when he witnessed the 1879 apparition, and settled in the US in 1910 after spells in the US and England.