Alice Pagett—Father Hagan: parish priest and parishioner

Alice Pagett’s relationship with Father Hagan begins in the parish and becomes a measure of how radically their familiar world has changed. He is not simply the priest who attends to a parishioner: he has known her since before her birth, watched her grow up, and encouraged her to take part in church life despite her deafness and muteness. That history makes his eventual fear of her more than a change in pastoral judgment. It breaks the trust and recognition built over years, at the same time that Alice’s attachment to St. Joseph’s Church makes separation from it painful.

A Relationship Rooted in the Parish

Father Hagan arrived in the parish shortly before Alice was born and remained present through the milestones of her childhood. He gave her First Communion and encouraged her to play with the other children despite her disability. These details establish a relationship grounded in sustained familiarity and practical care, rather than in a single episode of crisis. Father Hagan had seen Alice as a baby and as a child growing up; her condition was part of the life he had witnessed, not an unfamiliar circumstance he encountered only after the reported cures.

The church itself belonged to that shared history. Alice had known St. Joseph’s all her young life, and Bishop Caines described it as a second home to her. Alice’s mother had worked there, and Alice was strongly attached to the place. When Father Hagan proposed keeping her away permanently, Bishop Caines answered that she had been found weeping in her room because she missed the church. The disagreement therefore concerns more than access to a building: it places Father Hagan’s assessment of danger against the significance the parish and its church have acquired in Alice’s life.

From Care to Exclusion

Father Hagan’s wish to exclude Alice emerged in two stages. First, he told Bishop Caines that he thought it best for her to stay away for a while. When the bishop challenged the wisdom of that decision and asked whom it was meant to benefit, Father Hagan answered that it was for Alice. Later, his position hardened: he interrupted a discussion of Alice’s attachment to the church to say that she should be kept away from St. Joseph’s permanently. The movement from a temporary absence to permanent exclusion registers an escalation in his concern, even though the available account does not present the initial proposal as a clearly explained accusation against Alice.

Bishop Caines resisted that escalation. He considered permanent separation impossible, pointing both to Alice’s lifelong connection to the church and to her distress when kept from it. The exchange exposes the limits of Father Hagan’s pastoral authority: he could urge distance, but he could not simply determine that Alice should be cut off from the place she regarded as home. It also leaves the relationship under strain. The priest who had once encouraged her participation now argued for her removal, while the bishop treated her attachment as a reason that exclusion could not be sustained.

A Familiar Child Becomes a Source of Fear

Monsignor Delgard later connected Father Hagan’s changing attitude to the priest’s growing doubts and to the events surrounding Alice. According to Delgard, Father Hagan had not believed that the cures were miraculous and did not believe Alice had seen the Blessed Virgin. Delgard contrasted those doubts with his memory of Alice as a good, innocent child who liked helping her mother at St. Joseph’s. The account does not reduce Father Hagan’s response to a simple reversal from belief to disbelief: his uncertainty about the claims existed alongside a long-standing knowledge of Alice, and his fear developed in the final weeks of his life.

Gerry Fenn recalled seeing that fear at the convent the previous Sunday. Although he first described Alice as sick, Delgard directed his attention to Father Hagan’s expression before that episode. Fenn then acknowledged that the priest had looked terrified. The remembered look gives visible force to the change Delgard describes: Father Hagan was not merely recommending a cautious absence; he appeared frightened of an eleven-year-old he had known since infancy. The recollection also complicates the earlier history of care without erasing it. His fear is disturbing precisely because it comes after years of pastoral familiarity and encouragement.

The Relationship’s Reversal

Delgard interpreted Father Hagan’s physical decline as the draining of his life-force, paralleling what he called the depletion of the church’s spiritual essence. He also said that he should have recognized what was happening when Father Hagan shared his doubts. This is Delgard’s explanation of the priest’s condition, not an independent account that establishes its cause. Within the relationship, however, it links Father Hagan’s worsening state to the same period in which his view of Alice changed and fear displaced his former confidence in her innocence.

The relationship thus carries a sharp reversal without cancelling its earlier tenderness. Father Hagan’s acts of care—watching Alice grow, giving her First Communion, and encouraging her to join other children—remain part of the history that makes his later wish to remove her from church so consequential. Alice’s attachment to St. Joseph’s, in turn, shows that their parish connection was embedded in a wider bond between her and the place where he had served her. Their story is not presented as a simple quarrel between priest and parishioner, but as a rupture in a long-established pastoral relationship: the priest who had helped Alice belong to the parish came to fear her, while others insisted that the church remained her second home.