Father Andrew Hagan’s sudden death, reported as a heart attack after a choking episode at dinner, becomes a point of uncertainty in the account of the Banfield events. Gerry Fenn was present and tried to help him, but his recollection does not fit neatly with the postmortem finding. Hagan’s death is also a personal loss for Alice Pagett, to whom he was close, and later a public one: his memory is invoked at a major service as attention to Alice and the reported cures continues to build.

The reported death and Fenn’s account

The clearest account comes after Hagan’s death, when Fenn is asked whether he was there during the priest’s heart attack. He confirms that he was and says that he tried to save Hagan. The postmortem attributed the death to a heart attack; Fenn, however, remembers believing that Hagan was choking. He recalls seeing meat in Hagan’s throat and trying to remove it. That remembered detail explains why the official finding does not settle the matter for him, even though he offers no firm alternative cause.

Fenn does not claim to know whether the episode was asphyxiation, a heart attack, or some combination. He considers that Hagan may have imagined that he was choking, and also wonders whether the two conditions could have occurred together. The uncertainty is central to the event’s later telling: the death has an official medical explanation, but the surviving witness’s account remains vivid and unresolved. The scene does not establish that the postmortem was wrong, nor does it confirm Fenn’s impression as the cause of death.

Signs of strain before the episode

In recounting the death, Fenn separates the dinner episode from Hagan’s preceding state. He says the priest had been highly strung for weeks, rather than becoming distressed only as his heart was failing. Fenn also describes Hagan as having been in a hysterical state toward the end, but clarifies that this was not the period he meant when he spoke of the earlier strain. His account therefore places the death against a longer period of unease without identifying a single cause for it.

That distinction matters because the novel sets Hagan’s personal condition beside the extraordinary claims gathering around Alice. His death is not presented as proof of anything supernatural, and Fenn’s speculation does not explain what caused the priest’s weeks of strain. Instead, the recollection leaves two kinds of uncertainty in view: what physically happened at dinner, and what had been troubling Hagan beforehand. The difference between an observable crisis and a witness’s attempt to interpret it remains unresolved.

Losses close to Alice

A later newspaper account places Hagan’s death within the sequence of losses surrounding Alice. It identifies him as her parish priest and says she was very close to him. He died of a heart attack a few days before the death of her father, Leonard Pagett, in a car crash. The report describes Alice as silent at Leonard’s graveside and apparently shocked by the second tragedy in her short life within a week. Hagan’s death is thus more than a disputed medical episode: it is one of the losses that forms the immediate background to Alice’s bereavement.

The newspaper account also shows how quickly private grief is folded into public attention. Leonard’s funeral draws onlookers and pressmen, while Alice is described through the public identity already attached to her as the Miracle Worker of Banfield. Hagan’s death is mentioned as part of that same compressed sequence of events, reinforcing the contrast between Alice’s personal losses and the growing spectacle around her alleged powers. The account does not say that Hagan’s death caused the public interest, but it shows that his loss is reported as part of the story being told about Alice.

A death made public

Hagan’s memory is later incorporated into a special Mass attended by a vast congregation. The priest leading the service dedicates it to Hagan and Monsignor Delgard, honoring their work in the name of the Catholic Church. In that setting, Hagan’s death has moved beyond the private account Fenn gives of the dinner episode: it becomes part of the public religious observance assembled around the reported cures and Alice’s role in them.

The scale of the gathering complicates that act of remembrance. Monsignor Delgard worries about the sick and disabled who have come in hope, and hopes that disappointment will not damage their faith. Hagan’s name is spoken within a ceremony whose organizers and participants are confronting the very expectations that have grown around Alice. His death therefore appears both as a genuine personal and ecclesiastical loss and as part of a larger public narrative that the novel leaves open to doubt.

Narrative significance

The event is conveyed retrospectively, principally through Fenn’s conversation about what he witnessed, rather than through a fully presented scene of the death itself. That form keeps the reader close to the limits of his knowledge: he remembers trying to help, but cannot establish why Hagan died. The postmortem account, Fenn’s recollection, and later public references to the priest’s heart attack coexist without eliminating the uncertainty between them.

Hagan’s death also links intimate relationships to the developing Banfield crisis. His closeness to Alice makes the loss personal; the later report places it alongside Leonard’s death; and the Mass gives it a communal and institutional afterlife. The sequence does not turn Hagan into evidence for or against Alice’s alleged miracles. Instead, it shows how a death with an accepted medical explanation can remain unsettled in memory, while its meaning is reshaped by grief, public attention, and the rituals that follow.