Finn Commissioned to Investigate St. Joseph’s Church and the Pagetts

Monsignor Delgard commissions Gerry Fenn to look beyond the public debate over Alice Pagett’s recovery and investigate St. Joseph’s Church, Banfield, and Alice’s parents. The request turns Fenn’s existing journalistic work into a search for a hidden local history: Delgard believes something is missing from the account of Alice and her family, but cannot identify what it is. The inquiry unfolds amid institutional caution, commercial opportunity, and a growing crowd eager to treat Banfield as a place of pilgrimage.

The commission and its rationale

Delgard asks Fenn to find out about St. Joseph’s Church and the village, including whether something significant may have happened there in the past. He argues that Fenn’s distance from the Church makes him a more useful investigator: Delgard expects to spend the coming months organizing St. Joseph’s, preparing for pilgrims, and supervising building work, while his involvement in Father Hagan’s death and the church’s atmosphere makes it difficult for him to see matters objectively. Fenn has already reached an agreement with Bishop Caines and George Southworth, so Delgard presents the historical inquiry as an extension of that work rather than a wholly separate assignment.

The request also has a sharply personal strand. Delgard wants Fenn to learn more about Alice and her parents because he senses an unexplained omission in what is known about them. He cannot offer a theory or a defined lead; he says that discovering what is missing is itself part of the task. Fenn responds that Delgard may be becoming unhinged, but accepts that the work falls within his assignment. The exchange establishes the inquiry’s central uncertainty: its investigator is asked to pursue a gap whose shape even the person commissioning him cannot yet describe.

Medical evidence and contested explanations

The commission follows a recovery that has attracted both public attention and religious scrutiny. Alice had been unable to hear or speak for seven years, and her sudden ability to do both prompted Father Hagan to take her to Sussex Hospital in Brighton for testing. Earlier specialists had found no physical malformation in her ears or throat and had regarded her condition as psychosomatic. The later examination likewise found no physical change that would explain the recovery, reinforcing the prior view that her impairment had psychological origins. The medical account could describe the change, but did not settle what had caused it.

The Church, meanwhile, resists an immediate declaration of a miracle. Bishop Caines emphasizes that a claim must be investigated thoroughly under rules associated with Pope Benedict XIV and intended to guard against a false proclamation that scientific evidence might later overturn. At a press conference, Caines says that the Church acknowledges extraordinary cures at St. Joseph’s but will not make an announcement before examination. The land beside the church has already been agreed for purchase, while the six alleged cures are to be investigated individually by a specially formed medical bureau and referred to the International Medical Committee.

Monsignor Delgard distinguishes medical assessment from religious judgment. The medical bodies are to determine whether a cure is medically inexplicable, not whether it has a divine cause. Their work includes consulting each patient’s general practitioner and hospital, reviewing existing records, conducting examinations, and assembling a dossier. They must assess whether a cure was sudden, complete, lasting, and associated with a sufficiently established illness; confirmation may require three or four years. A condition attributed to mental disorder would not qualify under these criteria. This division of authority gives Fenn’s assignment a broader context: the medical inquiry can test what happened to Alice, while the commission asks what the Church, the village, and the family history may reveal beyond a medical finding.

A village being remade

Fenn’s work also takes place in a community where the supposed miracle has economic consequences. Before the pilgrimage attention, Southworth describes Banfield’s visitor trade as limited: guests at his hotel chiefly use it as a base for touring the Sussex countryside or visiting Brighton and other south-coast resorts, leaving little benefit for the village. He and Rodney Tucker are interested in investment, but wary of spending money without a reasonable return. Southworth also points to undeveloped land and the possibility of the village expanding into a town, a prospect Fenn privately connects to profit for Southworth and his associates.

After the Sunday service, the scale of attention changes. Southworth hears that five people with documented illnesses were healed; two recoveries remain incomplete, with the man whose cataracts cleared still lacking perfect sight and a boy with a weakened leg still struggling to walk unaided. The episode becomes worldwide news, bringing press, television, and magazine crews to Banfield. Southworth expects pilgrims, tourists, and thrill-seekers to arrive in large numbers, while the parish council becomes unusually active in discussing expansion. He also believes the Church may have to cooperate with local plans, though Bishop Caines sets a limit: cooperation must not cheapen the event or compromise the dignity of the Roman Catholic Church.

The transformation is visible at the roadside as well as in council discussions. Makeshift stalls display small religious statues, trinkets, and hastily printed images; one shrine substitutes a newspaper photograph of Alice for an earlier holy picture, and a mechanical doll offers a fragment of a prayer. Such goods place devotional objects, souvenirs, and spectacle side by side. They make the commercial pressures surrounding Fenn’s investigation concrete: Banfield is not only a question of disputed evidence, but a village whose new identity is being produced through publicity, pilgrimage, investment, and sales.

The historical trail

The commission’s demand to look into the past acquires a more specific direction when Fenn encounters a chronicle attributed to Thomas Woolgar. Its first-person account presents Einor as a revered healer who received gifts from villagers: valuable offerings were secretly kept in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Church, while gifts of little value were given to the priory. It depicts a public reputation for holiness that concealed a darker character, and describes children gathering around her as people sought her blessing. These details complicate the apparent opposition between a trusted religious figure and a dangerous one: in the chronicle, the same reputation that draws people to Einor helps conceal what the writer alleges about her.

Woolgar’s account is also an accusation against its author. He portrays himself as culpable and compromised, while claiming that Einor’s influence and posthumous presence continued to threaten him. He alleges that she considered poisoning the prioress and writes as though her vengeance persists beyond death. The manuscript therefore supplies Fenn with a historical narrative, not independent confirmation of its claims. Its distressed, self-incriminating voice leaves open how much should be attributed to fact, guilt, or Woolgar’s apparent instability. The commission’s past-facing question consequently becomes a problem of evidence as well as discovery: Fenn must investigate not only what the old account says, but what kind of witness it is.

Significance of the assignment

Delgard’s request links several forms of inquiry without allowing any one of them to settle the whole mystery. Medical professionals examine the recoveries; Church authorities reserve judgment on their spiritual meaning; local promoters anticipate economic growth; and Fenn is charged with looking for history and family information that these public processes may leave out. The assignment’s defining feature is its open-endedness: Delgard identifies the need for an answer before he knows what question the evidence will finally make possible. As Banfield’s apparent sacred status becomes a source of public attention and commercial activity, Fenn’s investigation is tasked with testing the distance between the story the village is beginning to sell and the unresolved past beneath it.