Banfield's pilgrimage boom

Banfield’s pilgrimage boom is the transformation of a quiet village into a destination for people seeking faith, healing, spectacle, or a glimpse of Alice Pagett. It brings new attention and commercial hopes to the community, but its scale depends on more than reports of cures: crowds come to share an atmosphere of expectation that participants experience as spiritual in its own right. The boom therefore holds two impulses together—pilgrimage as a communal religious experience and pilgrimage as an opportunity to develop and profit from Banfield.

Origins and Local Ambitions

Before the crowds arrive in force, Banfield’s limited tourist appeal is part of the case for development. George Southworth explains to Gerry Fenn that the hotel can be busy in summer, but its guests mainly use the village as a base for visiting the Sussex countryside, Brighton, and other south-coast resorts. The resulting benefit to Banfield is small. Southworth says he would invest more if he expected a reasonable return, and Rodney Tucker shares the interest while hesitating to risk money. Southworth also points to local land that could be developed and the possibility that the village might grow into a town. Fenn recognizes the financial interest behind the proposal: the anticipated religious draw could also enrich local businesspeople and landowners.

Southworth makes the prospect seem plausible by comparing Banfield with Walsingham and Aylesford, English towns that attract pilgrims despite uncertainty about whether a visitation of the Virgin Mary occurred at Aylesford and the absence of spectacular miracles there. In his account, the enduring draw is the pilgrims’ belief that these are holy places. Banfield, he argues, has at least the reported recovery of Alice, who had been unable to hear and speak for years. Fenn remains unconvinced that an extraordinary occurrence necessarily establishes a miracle, but the comparison gives the proposed development a model: a place can become a destination through its reputation and the faith attached to it, not only through repeated dramatic events.

Crowds and Shared Expectation

Sue first describes the change at St. Joseph’s Church as an experience of its own. People are arriving with children and with sick or disabled relatives; to her, the gathering resembles a pilgrimage, and its happiness seems to reach visitors before they enter the church grounds. She acknowledges that there have been no further physical miracles or apparitions, but insists that the atmosphere itself is what matters. Her account marks a change in what the pilgrimage offers: the draw is no longer limited to waiting for a cure or apparition, but includes being among people who share hope and excitement.

A rumor that Alice has told her mother and Father Hagan that the Lady wants to see her again on Sunday the 28th intensifies that expectation. As Gerry Fenn drives through Banfield with Sue and Ben, traffic and activity are unusually heavy for a cold, drizzling Sunday, and Sue says the rumor has spread. At the church entrance, the crowd is dense enough that Sue has to hold Ben close to keep him from being jostled. Fenn sees people helping a teenage girl whose movements suggest a serious disorder and a boy in a wheelchair surrounded by family. His attention settles on the hope visible among those accompanying the sick, as well as their vulnerability to disappointment. Their presence gives the gathering human stakes beyond the village’s ambitions or the public’s curiosity.

The crowds turn the approach to the church into a shared passage from ordinary village life into an event organized around expectation. Fenn arrives prepared to photograph and record whatever happens, initially treating the visit as material for a follow-up story. Yet he finds himself caught up in the crowd’s mood even while doubting that anything spectacular will occur. The gathering brings believers, pilgrims, and the merely curious into the same space, without making their reasons identical. Its collective excitement is part of the phenomenon: people arrive hoping to witness a sign, but the mass of other people and their anticipation helps make the place feel set apart.

The Cures and the Pilgrimage’s Expansion

After the Sunday gathering, the reported cures change the scale of the boom. Southworth celebrates that five people with genuine illnesses or debilities have been cured, with their conditions confirmed by doctors and hospital records. The outcomes are not presented as equally complete: the man whose cataracts have cleared still has imperfect vision, though it is improving, and the boy with a previously crippled leg remains unable to walk without difficulty while his wasted muscles recover. These qualifications coexist with Southworth’s conviction that the other conditions have disappeared and that the events cannot be dismissed as fraud.

News of the cures travels internationally, drawing press, television, and magazine reporters to Banfield. The village becomes busier than its residents have ever known, and Southworth describes them as not merely enduring the attention but thriving on it. At a parish council meeting, members who had not previously shown such energy listen to expansion plans. One councillor’s estimate of millions of visitors provokes laughter, though the possibility is not wholly dismissed. Southworth expects the publicity to bring pilgrims, tourists, and thrill-seekers in large numbers, and he believes that the church will have to respond to the village’s new circumstances. He approaches Bishop Caines, who is receptive to cooperation between the church and parish council, while insisting that any plans must avoid cheap exploitation and preserve the dignity of the Church.

Later gatherings show how far that public identity has developed. At the open-air service, people enter the field hours before Mass, filling benches near the altar and spreading outward through the grounds. Some want to see Alice; others hope to be close to her holiness. Wheelchairs move with difficulty over the churned earth, and ushers recognize that future gatherings may need a designated area for invalids. Monsignor Delgard looks out over thousands, including sick people and those with disabilities whose expressions show their expectation. He fears that the earlier events cannot be repeated and hopes the service will not leave them disappointed, even as the congregation’s shared emotion affects him and unsettles his certainty. The scale of the assembly makes both the pastoral responsibility and the risk of frustrated hope harder to ignore.

Commercialization and the New Sacred Landscape

The pilgrimage boom also makes religious imagery into merchandise. Along the road, makeshift stalls display small statues, religious trinkets, and posters of the Virgin and Christ. At a later gathering, Gerry Fenn and Nancy Shelbeck see containers sold as holding holy soil from the field, a plastic Mary inside a dome of water, a small plastic shrine with candles and a newspaper photograph of Alice, a lit grotto, and a doll loosely modeled on her. The objects turn the new reputation of the field and the child into portable souvenirs. Their hurried, makeshift character contrasts with the reverence of the crowds, while their presence shows how quickly an emerging holy place can become a marketplace.

By the candlelight procession, many people call the site the Field of the Holy Virgin. The procession is led by Bishop Caines and includes priests, nuns, and Alice; thousands have come, some from Banfield and others from far away. A broadcast report notes that some pilgrims had not previously held deep religious beliefs and describes the gathering as an expression of faith amid wider turmoil, though interference disrupts the transmission. The boom has thus carried Banfield beyond the original local calculation of investment: it gathers people who understand their visit as a religious turning point, even as the village, church, media, and traders each encounter the crowd from a different position. The same field is at once a site of shared devotion, public spectacle, practical crowd management, and commercial opportunity.