Banfield’s second miracle

Banfield’s second miracle is the extraordinary gathering at the field beside St. Joseph’s Church where Alice Pagett levitates beneath the oak and five people experience sudden recoveries. The scene turns a private question about Alice’s earlier restoration of hearing and speech into a public spectacle: a rain-soaked crowd watches her rise, then sees illness and disability apparently give way around her. Its consequences are both bodily and institutional. The witnesses confront what they have seen, while the Church moves to acquire the field and subject the claimed cures to formal medical scrutiny.

Setting and Background

The event unfolds in an open field beside St. Joseph’s Church, under a bare, deformed oak, in persistent drizzle. Gerry Fenn approaches as a reporter, photographing Alice, the tree, and the people gathered behind her. The crowd’s faces register more than apprehension: they are fearful, longing for something to happen. Alice’s mother is among those kneeling nearby, eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer.

Before anything changes, the gathering is suspended between ordinary observation and expectation. Fenn sees Alice standing still and gazing up at the oak; the children nearest her smile, while adults remain more guarded. Then the field becomes unnaturally quiet. The rain continues, but birds, sheep, and traffic can no longer be heard. A sudden, cold wind rises, making the oak’s distorted limbs sway and howl. Some people retreat; others stay, frightened or desperate, and many kneel. Father Hagan tries to reach Alice, but Monsignor Delgard holds him back. The wind stops as abruptly as it began, leaving the crowd relieved but without an explanation.

Alice’s Levitation

After the wind dies, Alice stretches her arms toward the still oak and speaks, though the people around her cannot make out her words. She laughs, and then the crowd gasps: her feet are two or three inches above the grass. Fenn initially resists what he sees, knowing that levitation is usually associated with conjuring tricks, but there is no stage or concealed apparatus in the open field. His camera remains in his pocket; he finds himself unable, and unwilling, to use it.

Alice stays suspended at a fixed height, her body motionless apart from her lips. The people around her sink to their knees, while Fenn experiences a peculiar weakness and numbness, as though his strength is being drained. The priests remain standing, although Monsignor Delgard grips Father Hagan’s arm for support. Alice then descends slowly, the grass bending beneath her feet before she touches the ground. Her rapturous smile marks the transition from the apparition-like spectacle to the healings that follow.

The Five Recoveries

A small boy runs toward Alice with gray-black warts covering his hands. His mother breaks free from her husband and rushes to him as the growths fade. Nearby, a teenage girl who has been unable to control her facial muscles and limbs stands without trembling or twitching. She examines her hands and legs, then approaches Alice and weeps at her feet. Each recovery takes place in full view of the crowd, turning private illness into public testimony.

A man whose eyes are clouded by cataracts is guided forward by people in the crowd. Before he reaches Alice, he falls and sobs; then the opacity in his eyes begins to clear. After five years, he starts to see colors and shapes again. His tears blur the returning sight, even as the people around him watch the change.

Another family has brought a seven-year-old girl who has never spoken. When she asks her mother why the man on the ground is crying, her words are unclear but intelligible to her mother, who understands them as the girl’s first speech. The child’s question makes the change audible as well as visible, and gives the crowd a distinct sign of recovery alongside the more immediately apparent healings.

The fifth recovery involves a boy who has been carried into the field wrapped in a blanket. As people around him collapse or fall against one another, he sits upright, pushes the blanket aside, and begins to rise. His movements are stiff and awkward, like those of a newborn lamb, but his legs carry him forward. Adults support his arms as he walks toward Alice; only when he comes within touching distance does he sink to the ground. His father holds his shoulders while they look at her. By then, Fenn’s own strength is beginning to return, though he is still too unsteady to stand.

Witnesses and Immediate Effect

The scene changes the crowd from an anxious audience into a group of witnesses to apparent recoveries. People kneel, collapse, reach for one another, or try to help those moving toward Alice. The sequence links spectacle to bodily cost: Fenn feels weak and cold during the levitation, and many people around him lose the strength to remain upright. The text leaves uncertain whether the priests’ kneeling is an act of homage or the same debilitating weakness affecting Fenn and the crowd. Father Hagan bows his head into his hands and rocks back and forth; Monsignor Delgard stares at Alice beneath the towering oak.

The event also alters the significance of Alice’s first recovery. Her return to hearing and speech had already drawn attention, but her apparent role in several further cures, after levitating in the open field, makes the claims harder to contain as an individual medical case. Father Hagan had understood Alice’s earlier deafness and muteness as psychological in origin: no physical malformation had been found, and her mind had seemed to prevent her from hearing or speaking. That history complicates any effort to classify the recoveries as miraculous under medical rules that exclude infirmities attributed to mental disorder.

Investigation and Significance

The Church does not immediately pronounce the field healings miracles. Bishop Caines says that the six reported cures—the five recoveries at the gathering considered alongside Alice’s earlier return of hearing and speech—will be examined by a specially formed medical bureau, with its findings passed to the International Medical Committee. The Church has already reached agreement to purchase the land beside St. Joseph’s Church, bringing the field into the orbit of church property even as the investigation remains unresolved.

The bureau is to consult each cured person’s general practitioner and hospital, conduct its own examinations, and keep a dossier for each case. Its members are to include at least twelve medical professionals; the body is described as independent, though the Church will employ its director and several members. The committee can recommend whether a cure is medically inexplicable, but Bishop Caines retains the final decision on whether the cures should be declared miraculous. Monsignor Delgard distinguishes that medical finding from a religious judgment: the investigators assess the cure, not whether divine intervention caused it.

The stated criteria make the distinction consequential. A cure must be sudden, unexpected, complete, and lasting, with three or four years allowed to pass before permanence can be confirmed. Investigators must establish the seriousness and nature of the illness, whether it was objectively demonstrated by tests, X-rays, or biopsies, and whether previous treatment contributed to the recovery. The medical evaluation therefore cannot settle the spiritual question by itself. In this way, the second miracle is both a spectacle of apparent transformation and the beginning of a contested process: witnesses see recoveries in the field, while Church authorities insist that observation, medical evidence, and religious discernment remain separate judgments.