In May 1963, an Italian Army soldier was carried into the bathing pools at Lourdes in France. He had a sarcoma of the pelvis. His hip joint had been destroyed by the tumour. He could not walk. He was dipped in the cold spring water. He went home to Italy. Within a month he was walking. Within nine years his destroyed hip had spontaneously rebuilt itself. The Vatican's independent medical investigators called it medically inexplicable.

His name was Vittorio Micheli. Twenty-three years old. A private in the Italian Alpine troops. In April 1962, he had developed sudden severe pain in his left buttock. A military X-ray on the twenty-second of May 1962 showed the bone of his ilium and acetabulum eaten away by what an open biopsy then identified as an infiltrating sarcoma. The tumour had partly destroyed the inferior gluteal muscle. He was not a candidate for radiotherapy. He was not a candidate for chemotherapy. The military doctors sent him home in a plaster cast with a prognosis of months.

In May 1963, in pain and unable to walk, Micheli made a pilgrimage to Lourdes in southwestern France. He was bathed in the cold spring water of the grotto at Massabielle. He went back to Trento in northern Italy with no medical intervention of any kind. Within a month he was walking again. He returned to his army unit. Serial follow-up X-rays through to 1971 showed something that no one had ever recorded in modern medical literature. The destroyed bone of his ilium and acetabulum had reconstructed itself. The hip joint that had been eaten away was whole. The International Medical Committee of Lourdes, a body of more than thirty independent doctors of various faiths and none, reviewed his case in 1969 and again in 1971. They reached unanimous conclusions. The cure was medically inexplicable. There is no known mechanism for a high-grade sarcoma to spontaneously regress and a destroyed bone joint to spontaneously regrow in an adult human.

In 1976, the Archbishop of Trento formally declared the cure of Vittorio Micheli the sixty-third officially recognised miracle at Lourdes. Dr Barbara A. Neilan, an American physician, published a full medical case review in the peer-reviewed Linacre Quarterly in 2013. The X-rays are in the file. The biopsy slides are in the file. Vittorio Micheli is alive. He still walks. He has returned to Lourdes every year for sixty years. You can read the case file.

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