Sue Gates’s Renewed Catholic Faith

Sue Gates’s renewed Catholic faith is a gradual recovery of trust, not a simple conversion from doubt to certainty. After Alice Pagett’s cure and the other reported healings at St. Joseph’s Church, Sue finds herself drawn into a shared emotional response among worshippers. That renewed belief changes how she sees Gerry Fenn, whose detachment makes plain that they have not experienced the same event in the same way.

A faith rekindled among worshippers

Sue’s emotions have been gathering over the three weeks before she returns to St. Joseph’s Church with Gerry Fenn and Ben. The crowded church, with more wheelchairs alongside the benches, confronts her with the people drawn there by the reported cures. As she moves through the congregation, feelings long held in check begin to surface: compassion, love for others, and an anticipation that is both exhilarating and frightening.

Sue is not certain that Alice’s cure was miraculous. What she knows is that she has witnessed something extraordinary, and that its impression has rekindled her trust. Her religious life had been a spiritual wilderness, sustained by only a thin thread of belief; now the change feels like a gradual return, at first tenuous and then strengthened by her own willingness to accept it. The worshippers’ shared trust seems to her to fill the church as insistently as the smell of incense. Holding Ben close and touching Gerry, she feels connected to the people around her as well as to those she loves.

Fenn’s skepticism and their estrangement

The moment is interrupted when Gerry Fenn turns and winks. Sue reads the gesture as a return to his ordinary, mocking perspective: he is at the church, she thinks, because there may be another story to report, not because he wants to share her experience. The wink breaks the emotional connection she had hoped for. She sees in it the contempt of someone who will not trust because belief might compromise his own opportunism, and, in that instant, despises him. Gerry notices the hostility in her expression but does not understand its cause.

Their disagreement becomes explicit when Sue explains why she has avoided him. She says that she has found her faith again and has no time for anything else; when Gerry asks whether being Catholic excludes being in love, she clarifies that it does not, but says he is probably not the right person for her. Her objection is not simply that he doubts the cures. She tells him that others who were present have undergone profound emotional experiences and believe they witnessed divine healing, while he can acknowledge what happened without being affected by it. To Sue, his failure to respond exposes a deeper distance: he can turn the events into an opportunity to make a name for himself, but cannot share the trust and reordered sense of life they have brought to others.

Doubt, conversation, and a less insulated belief

Sue’s renewed faith remains unsettled rather than absolute. Gerry argues that religious belief and publicity need not be opposites, casting himself as a possible instrument for spreading the story. Sue is still confused, but admits that she may have been keeping her head in the sand. She considers the possibility that beliefs can no longer remain insulated or introspective, and even allows that Gerry’s cynicism might be healthy because it can guard against being carried away.

This exchange complicates the earlier rupture. Sue does not withdraw her criticism of Gerry’s self-interest, nor does she declare that his skepticism has become faith. Instead, she recognizes that doubt may have a place in the way people examine and communicate belief. Her renewed Catholicism is therefore shown as both personal and open to revision: the experience at the church has restored trust, but it has not removed uncertainty or ended the need to think through what the experience means.

Banfield’s contested religious meaning

Sue’s response takes place amid competing attempts to define the cures. Southworth presents the events as possibly divine while also seeing a chance for Banfield to escape decline and regain religious belief; he asks Gerry to write more about what will become known as the Banfield Miracle. The tension between sincere religious hope and material advantage makes the public meaning of the events uncertain, even as they give Sue a reason to return to faith.

The Roman Catholic Church likewise treats the cures as consequential without immediately declaring them miraculous. Bishop Caines says that the reported five cures, together with Alice Pagett’s recovery, may draw thousands of people through curiosity and religious expectation, and argues that the Church must control the situation from the beginning. In a public account, he describes the cases as extraordinary but alleged cures, announces that St. Joseph’s Medical Bureau will examine them before submitting findings to the International Medical Committee, and states that the Church has reached an agreement to purchase the adjoining field. Such investigation and acquisition bring the emerging pilgrimage under institutional oversight. Against this public contest over evidence, authority, and opportunity, Sue’s renewed faith remains grounded in a more intimate fact: she has been moved by what she witnessed, and that experience has made trust possible again.