Monsignor Delgard and Gerry Fenn's investigative partnership

Monsignor Delgard and Gerry Fenn’s investigative partnership joins a priest trained to weigh religious claims against evidence with a reporter who repeatedly confronts events he cannot explain. Their inquiry begins amid the Banfield cures, where medicine, Church procedure, and public belief compete to define what has happened. It grows into a search for historical records and the source of the disturbances around St. Joseph’s Church, binding the two men through practical investigation, disagreement, and danger.

The investigation takes shape

The partnership develops in response to the sudden attention surrounding Alice Pagett’s recovery of hearing and speech and the other reported cures. Delgard explains that the Church cannot simply declare them miracles: a medical bureau must first examine whether the recoveries are medically inexplicable, while spiritual judgment belongs to the bishop and his advisers. In a public account of the process, he describes the need to examine medical records, consult each patient’s doctor and hospital, and assemble a dossier for review. The six reported cures are therefore not treated as a single undifferentiated claim; each case must be investigated on its own terms.

That distinction gives Fenn a framework for understanding Delgard’s role. The medical process can assess the condition and course of a cure, but it cannot itself establish divine intervention. Delgard is involved in both the Church’s response and the inquiry into unusual phenomena, while Fenn approaches the matter as a journalist seeking an account that can withstand scrutiny. When Fenn is urged to hear the medical team’s findings, Delgard offers to obtain the full report and translates its technical conclusions into accessible terms. In Alice’s case, those findings reinforce the longstanding view that her deafness and muteness had psychological origins: examinations found no physical damage to the relevant organs. Their work thus begins not with a shared certainty, but with the effort to separate what the evidence establishes from what remains unexplained.

Disagreement as a method

Delgard and Fenn do not become allies by losing their differences. Delgard presses for the recovery of the old church chest because he suspects that parish records may illuminate the present events. Fenn doubts that the chest will contain anything beyond routine religious material and challenges the assumption that the answer lies in historical documents. Delgard, in turn, reminds him that his own experience has already unsettled his earlier skepticism: Fenn had reported seeing a white statue of the Virgin Mary move and appear alive, yet continues to say he does not know what happened.

The exchange makes their partnership more than a division of clerical and journalistic tasks. Delgard asks Fenn to accept that an event may exceed his explanation without requiring him to settle immediately on a supernatural account. Fenn’s resistance, meanwhile, forces Delgard to explain why he considers the past relevant rather than treating his interpretation as self-evident. When Fenn asks what makes him so certain that the records hold the answer, Delgard admits that he is not certain. His reason for pursuing the chest is instead connected to a visit from Mother Marie-Claire, who had come to him deeply troubled. Their investigation proceeds through provisional judgments: Delgard offers a historical lead, Fenn tests its basis, and neither can yet close the case.

Records, testimony, and growing danger

The inquiry becomes more consequential when Fenn brings Delgard old manuscript papers recovered from a church on the Stapley estate. Delgard recognizes their importance and translates them, adding notes that distinguish the difficult, sometimes illegible script from his own interpretation. The papers preserve the account of a sixteenth-century priest, including his description of Einor’s death and his fear that her vengeance continued beyond her lifetime. Delgard’s reading connects that history to the present-day events and to Alice, whose conception took place in the field where Einor had been killed. The manuscript supplies the historical link that the two men had been seeking, while its troubled author and uncertain passages leave room for questions about how the past has been recorded.

Fenn does not merely deliver evidence for Delgard to interpret. After falling asleep while Delgard works, he wakes near one in the morning and finds the translated pages and the monsignor’s extensive notes on the desk. He begins reading them himself, encountering the account in Delgard’s working form rather than only hearing its conclusions. The arrangement reveals a complementary, if imperfect, collaboration: Delgard performs the translation and historical synthesis; Fenn follows the evidence and becomes a reader of the source material in his own right.

Their cooperation also extends to immediate consequences. After Fenn encounters an apparition at St. Peter’s Church at Stapley, Delgard later reflects that he should not have allowed the reporter to go there alone. Fenn has described the experience in detail, and Delgard recognizes that he is badly shaken. Nancy Shelbeck, also found nearby and in obvious shock, refuses hospital care; Delgard is concerned that she not be left alone, and she is taken to Sue Gates’s flat to rest. The investigation has therefore brought the partners into situations where gathering testimony and interpreting evidence cannot be separated from concern for those affected by it.

An unfinished partnership

By the time Fenn returns to St. Joseph’s Church, Delgard’s investigation has reached a fatal point. Fenn sees the monsignor near the altar as the statue of the Madonna breaks apart and explodes, striking Delgard with its fragments. Fenn runs to him, calls his name, and recognizes that he is dead. The small dark figure Fenn glimpses in the church is gone, leaving him alone beside the priest.

Delgard’s death ends the partnership without resolving all that it uncovered. The relationship has moved from a public inquiry into cures to a shared pursuit of records, testimony, and a historical explanation for the present danger. Its defining tension remains intact: Delgard is prepared to take seriously what reason cannot yet account for, while Fenn continues to distinguish witnessing an event from understanding it. Yet neither stance isolates them from the other. Delgard needs Fenn’s reporting and firsthand experience; Fenn depends on Delgard’s access to Church findings and his ability to interpret the manuscripts. Their investigation makes that mutual reliance visible, and its abrupt ending leaves Fenn with the evidence—and the loss—of the priest who had helped him make sense of it.