Knock Visionary to Be Reinterred at St. Patrick’s Cathedral

The remains of John Curry, the youngest visionary to have claimed to see the alleged 1879 apparition of the Virgin Mary at Knock, County Mayo, are to be reinterred at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan* this May.
The plan was conceived during Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s 2015 trip to Ireland, in which he met with Father Richard Gibbons, the parish priest of Knock. Father Gibbons mentioned to Cardinal Dolan that he had visited Curry’s grave, an unmarked plot in a Long Island cemetery.
“He was a little worried. He said it was obvious that the grave was old and that people had not been visiting it. I said we should move him to St Patrick’s,” Dolan told the Irish Independent at the time.
Curry was five at the time of the apparition, and one of 15 people to reportedly see it. Nearly 60 years later, in 1937, he gave his testimony before church officials during the formal investigation. At that time, Curry had been living in the United States for decades, having emigrated due to economic circumstances in Mayo. He never married, according to Maud Murphy, his cousin thrice-removed, and spent the last 11 years of his life with the Little Sisters of the Poor at the Sacred Heart Home on East 70th Street in New York and died in 1943. His current grave is only discoverable due to records kept by the Sisters, who own the plot from which Curry is to be exhumed and, Murphy says, “took charge of the burial arrangements as he had no close relatives in New York.” ♦
 
*The original version of this article misstated the location at which the remains will be reinterred. It is the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in lower Manhattan, not St. Patrick’s Cathedral.