Alice’s Early Banfield Healings and Recovery of Hearing and Speech

Alice Pagett’s sudden recovery of hearing and speech after seven years as a deaf-mute was the first Banfield cure to draw sustained attention, turning a local girl’s unexplained change into a test of how medicine and the Church would define a miracle. The recovery was medically real, but its cause and meaning remained contested: the evidence pointed to a psychological condition, while Father Hagan considered whether an emotional or spiritual experience might have brought her senses back into normal function.

The First Recovery

Alice had been unable to hear or speak for seven years. Specialists had found no physical malformation in her ears or throat and had concluded that her condition was psychological: her mind seemed to prevent her from hearing and speaking. After she reported a vision of the Immaculate Conception, she could hear and talk again. Father Hagan had taken her to Sussex Hospital in Brighton, where she was still undergoing tests as the significance of the change became apparent.

The distinction between cure and miracle was present from the outset. To the medical profession, the absence of an identifiable physical injury and the return of function could be understood as a change of mind, not as supernatural intervention. Father Hagan did not dismiss that account, but he considered the change itself potentially miraculous in a broader sense: the unresolved question was whether it had been self-induced or divinely caused. In his view, an emotional or spiritual experience could be the means by which repressed senses began working normally again, without the medical description settling the experience’s ultimate meaning.

Medical Findings and the Church’s Test

The later medical findings reinforced the psychological explanation of Alice’s former condition. Monsignor Delgard reported that examinations had found no discernible damage to the auditory nerves, ossicles, cochleae, or eardrums, and no disease or damage to the laryngeal nerve. A possible infection associated with Alice’s illness seven years earlier showed no signs of having persisted; mastoiditis and middle-ear infection had been discounted. Her condition had been considered a result of hysteria. The examinations therefore established the absence of physical damage, but did not identify what had produced the recovery.

The Church’s procedure kept medical judgment and religious interpretation distinct. Bishop Caines said the claims required thorough investigation under strict guidelines before any judgment could be made, while leaving open a faint possibility that the cures might eventually be recognized as miraculous. At a press conference, he described six extraordinary, or alleged, cures associated with St. Joseph’s Church and said a specially formed medical bureau would examine them before passing its findings to the International Medical Committee. The Church had also reached an agreement to purchase the adjacent field, where the cures had occurred, bringing the site within the practical scope of the investigation.

Monsignor Delgard specified that the medical bureau and International Medical Committee would assess whether a cure was medically inexplicable, not whether it had a religious cause. Their tests included whether it was sudden, complete, lasting, and without convalescence; whether the illness was serious and objectively established; and whether treatment had contributed to the recovery. A suspected mental disorder counted against acceptance as a miraculous cure, and a period of three or four years was expected to pass before a cure could be confirmed as lasting. Even an unexplained recovery would therefore be a medical finding first; the bishop and his advisers retained responsibility for judging whether divine intervention had caused it.

From Individual Case to Public Claim

Alice’s recovery helped make her a public figure, but publicity did not resolve the question the investigation was designed to answer. Later broadcasts described her as having seen a vision and as having been deaf and dumb until then, and reported that she and five others had been cured, including three people said to have illnesses the medical profession considered incurable. The reports also acknowledged skepticism, particularly within the Catholic Church. The widening public claim thus exceeded what the medical process had yet established: a cure could be witnessed and reported while its permanence, medical inexplicability, and spiritual significance remained undecided.

The episode’s importance lies in that unresolved space. Alice’s recovery supplied a concrete before-and-after change, while the tests found no damaged organ that could explain it. The Church did not simply equate that uncertainty with proof of divine action; it divided the work between medical examination and spiritual discernment, and required time before declaring a cure lasting. The first Banfield healing consequently became both an event in Alice’s life and the opening case in a contested inquiry into what a cure could demonstrate.