Monsignor Delgard

Monsignor Delgard is a senior priest whose investigation of Alice Pagett’s alleged visions and healings becomes a confrontation with a history of religious violence. While the crowds around St. Joseph’s Church grow and the Church examines Alice’s claims, Delgard finds evidence in Thomas Woolgar’s manuscript that links the present crisis to the sixteenth century. His path from cautious inquiry to conviction ends in the church, where the statue of the Virgin Mary explodes and kills him.

Role in the Banfield Investigation

Delgard is involved in the Church’s response to the claims surrounding Alice Pagett. He discusses the case with Gerry Fenn, who explains that Delgard is also troubled by the atmosphere at St. Joseph’s Church and has described it as spiritually devoid. This concern sets Delgard’s attention beyond the question of whether Alice’s healings can be verified: the church itself seems to him to have undergone a troubling change.

The scale of the public response gives that concern a visible context. On a cold, drizzling Sunday, unusually heavy traffic and crowds move toward the church; at its gate, Fenn, Sue, and Ben are caught among people drawn by belief, curiosity, and the hope of witnessing another miracle. By the time of the outdoor Mass, the field is filling well before the service begins. Many seek places near the altar, some hoping to see Alice and others hoping to be close to her holiness. Delgard is not the observer of these scenes, but his unease about the church develops amid a pilgrimage whose shared expectation has become difficult to separate from the institution’s religious purpose.

Delgard remains engaged with the investigation even as it becomes more urgent. Before a service, he asks Fenn to come to the church because he wants to hear what Fenn has uncovered. The exchange makes their inquiry practical as well as ecclesiastical: Delgard needs information, but he is also facing a public event whose participants expect confirmation of the miracles. His responsibilities therefore place him between the Church’s efforts to assess Alice and the needs of a crowd for whom the gathering has already acquired sacred significance.

Doubt, the Church, and the Crowds

Delgard’s anxiety is not simply disbelief in Alice. After Father Hagan’s death, he reflects on the priest’s visible weariness and on a spiritual fatigue that seems to hang over both the church and the house. The apparent contradiction unsettles him: sick people are being cured, and religious interest is spreading, yet he senses depression and fear rather than uncomplicated renewal. He wonders why a reported revival should coincide with such depletion. His doubts concern the spiritual condition surrounding the miracles, not only their outward credibility.

At the outdoor Mass, this conflict becomes immediate. Looking across the congregation, Delgard sees thousands, including sick people, cripples, and invalids whose expectant faces are turned toward him. He grieves for them and hopes their faith will not be damaged by disappointment, but he also wishes that the spectacle might end and that the crowd would recognize there are no miracles there. The congregation’s emotion presses upon him as he stands before it, and he struggles to reconcile compassion for those seeking help with his fear that the event is sustaining a false expectation.

His perspective also intersects with the institutional management of Alice’s claims. The Episcopal Council has convened to question her further, while Alice remains calm and resolute in her belief that she spoke with the Virgin Mary. Delgard must reckon with her conviction as well as with the public response. The moment does not resolve his uncertainty; instead, the growing attention makes the gap between formal scrutiny and popular faith harder to ignore.

Molly Pagett’s Disclosure and the Manuscript

A private disclosure from Molly Pagett sharpens Delgard’s unease. Molly regards Alice’s experience as holy and says that Leonard could not understand it because he did not believe in God. After Molly leaves, Delgard recalls what she has revealed: Alice was conceived in the field where she now sees visions. He tries to dismiss any connection between the place, the visions, and Alice’s earlier illness, reasoning that her deafness and muteness were a legacy of an ordinary childhood illness. Yet the disclosure troubles him precisely because his explanations do not settle his doubts. He recognizes that he is more uncertain than at any point in his ecclesiastical career and wonders whether Father Hagan’s sudden death has intensified his state of mind.

Delgard’s investigation then turns to a much older record. Working under ultraviolet light, he studies faded papers with rough, flaky edges and consults a thick book to translate their language. The handwriting appears to him tortured and possibly demented, but the account it preserves establishes, in his judgment, a link across centuries. The writer was a sixteenth-century cleric who had sinned against both faith and humanity. Delgard believes that this priest had some understanding of parapsychological forces, yet exploited other people’s superstitious beliefs and thereby called down a more dangerous power.

The manuscript describes Thomas Woolgar’s connection to Einor and his participation in the events surrounding her. Woolgar records knowing that Einor intended to poison the Prioress with arsenic compounds, slowly enough to avoid suspicion, and describes children disappearing over several months. He admits that three children were killed and that he helped suppress their screams when Einor punished them. His account repeatedly casts him as powerless or entranced, even as it records his choices and his role in the killings. Delgard’s discovery thus provides not a clean explanation but a disturbing testimony in which confession, self-excuse, religious language, and responsibility coexist.

Woolgar’s account places Einor’s accusation and punishment within the religious politics of Mary Tudor’s reign. He writes that the Prioress regarded Einor as a witch and dissenter, and that he agreed with this judgment despite knowing more than he admitted. When Einor accused him of complicity, he denied the charge and directed the villagers toward the supposed Devil’s Mark on her body. The villagers then attacked her. To Delgard, the manuscript’s importance lies not only in its account of alleged supernatural power but also in the way a religious leader’s denial and the crowd’s beliefs become instruments of violence.

Prayer, Death, and Significance

After translating the papers, Delgard prays at the altar in St. Joseph’s Church. Fear and confusion remain, and he finds no solution to the imminent danger. He is convinced that Woolgar’s words are true and that Einor’s curse is coming to pass. His belief in the power of the human mind and psyche makes the account intelligible to him, but it does not give him control over what it describes. Prayer is his response to knowledge that has deepened his fear rather than relieved it.

The manuscript also records that the parish chest and church records were moved to St. Peter’s, and that Woolgar believed his father had searched the documents for evidence that might disgrace the family. Woolgar says he hid the confession for future discovery. The surviving text therefore reaches Delgard as both historical testimony and a deliberately concealed record: what earlier custodians failed to find, or what was not included among the parish records, becomes newly legible to him centuries later.

Delgard’s death follows inside St. Joseph’s Church. Gerry Fenn sees a small hooded figure seated in a pew behind the priest and tries to call out, but cannot make his voice heard in time. The statue of the Virgin Mary explodes, and its fragments strike Delgard; he is thrown backward across the benches and dies. The death turns the church that he had found spiritually depleted into the site where the investigation’s historical and present-day strands meet in violence. Delgard’s final role is therefore double: he uncovers the record that makes the danger comprehensible, yet the revelation does not enable him to prevent its return.