Merseyside man Jack Traynor's sudden recovery declared first English miracle at Lourdes
ITV Granada Reports correspondent Rob Smith was at the mass where the case of John Traynor was declared a miracle
The sudden recovery of a man with epilepsy has been declared a miracle by the Archbishop of Liverpool Malcolm McMahon OP - making it the first English case to be recognised.
John (Jack) Traynor, from Merseyside, was cured of epilepsy, paralysis of the right arm and paraplegia while taking part in the archdiocese's first official pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1923
The case is believed to be miraculous by people across the archdiocese and beyond, but, despite an attempt in 1993, there has never been an official ecclesiastical declaration - until Sunday 8 December.
It is the 71st official miracle to have happened in Lourdes and the first person from England to be recognised.
His great-great-grandson Alex Taylor says while the story may be unbelievable to many, it is not to him after he visited the shrine.
"There's a story about when he wakes up the last morning of the pilgrimage and he is cured," he said.
"He leaps out of bed and he runs all the way to the grotto from where he has been staying.
"What I think was incredible being there and seeing that distance and to think about someone who hasn't walked for years running bare foot at full speed."
In 2023, Dr Kieran Moriarty, an English member of the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, was asked to conduct a review of the file of John Traynor held in the archives at Lourdes.
Dr Moriarty unearthed a reference in the file to a report by Dr Vallet, the then Acting President of the BdCM.
Dr Vallet had examined John Traynor in July 1926, together with three Liverpool doctors who had examined John at Lourdes in 1923, both before and after his cure and had written a report.
The report concluded: "We recognise and proclaim, along with our Confreres, that the process of this prodigious healing is absolutely outside and above the forces of nature."
His report, which was published in French, appears never to have been sent to Liverpool, and indeed no potential miraculous cures were ever referred from Lourdes to diocesan bishops between 1913 and 1946.
Dr Moriarty continued his research in archdiocesan archives and elsewhere, assembling an extensive dossier of evidence, and in particular contemporaneous medical evidence, relating to the cure of John Traynor. This dossier was then sent to the archdiocese by Monseigneur Jean-Marc Micas, the Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, over the summer.
Archbishop Malcolm said: "Given the weight of medical evidence, the testimony to the faith of John Traynor and his devotion to Our Blessed Lady, it is with great joy that I declare that the cure of John Traynor, from multiple serious medical conditions, is to be recognised as a miracle wrought by the power of God through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes."