Susan Gates

Susan Gates’s renewed Catholic faith reshapes both her response to the reported healings at St. Joseph’s Church and her relationship with Gerry Fenn. Where Fenn sees a story and remains untouched by the believers’ experience, Susan finds trust returning—and comes to regard their difference as a divide she cannot ignore.

Faith and the Church Gathering

After years in what she experiences as a spiritual wilderness, Susan’s attachment to religion had dwindled to a thin thread. Over the three weeks before the packed church gathering, however, her feelings had been growing. Among the congregants, with more wheelchairs beside the benches, she feels compassion and love for others rising into an emotion shared by the crowd. She embraces Ben, her son, and reaches for Fenn, wanting both their love.

Her response is not uncomplicated certainty. Susan is still unsure whether Alice Pagett’s cure was miraculous, though she wants to believe it was. What she cannot dismiss is that she witnessed something extraordinary at the church. The impression has rekindled her trust, and she senses that same trust among the people gathered around her.

Conflict with Gerry Fenn

The moment of shared feeling breaks when Fenn turns and winks. Susan reads the gesture as a flash of the journalist’s contempt: to her, he is present for a possible follow-up story and the professional advantage it might bring, not out of love or a wish to share her renewed belief. The contrast unsettles her so sharply that she despises him in that moment. Fenn notices her sudden hostility but does not understand its cause.

When they later discuss their estrangement, Susan says that she has found her faith again and has no time for anything else. She does not argue that Catholicism rules out love; instead, she tells Fenn that he is probably not the right person for her. Her decision grows from what she sees as a deeper incompatibility: he can acknowledge what happened, yet it has no effect on him, while she and other witnesses believe they experienced a divine act that reordered their lives.

Her Reading of the Miracles

Susan has spoken with many people who were present at the healings. She understands them as believing that the cures demonstrated God’s existence beyond doubt, and she regards their changed lives as part of the event’s significance. Against Fenn’s detachment, she places the scale of the gathering and the emotional conviction of those who believe they witnessed divine intervention.

She also rejects Fenn’s comparison between his own response and Father Andrew Hagan’s distress. Susan sees the priest as overwhelmed by the six reported miracles, including Alice’s levitation, and expects his humility to keep him in shock for some time. Her defense of him shows that her faith does not make every reaction identical: she interprets his distress as an understandable response to the events, while she reads Fenn’s lack of feeling as evidence of self-interest.

Relationships and Narrative Role

Susan’s care for Ben is visible in the church, where she holds him close amid the crowd. Her attachment to Fenn is more conflicted: she wants him to share the experience that has drawn her back to religion, but his apparent mockery exposes how differently they approach belief. Their disagreement is therefore both romantic and moral, turning on whether trust can coexist with what she sees as his opportunism.

A priest later tells Fenn that he has had a long discussion with Susan about him. The conversation’s contents are not disclosed, but its mention confirms that Susan has become a source of personal insight into Fenn for the clergy. In the wider account of the Banfield events, her arc connects communal religious renewal to private consequence: the gathering strengthens her faith, while the same experience makes her less able to sustain a relationship with someone who remains emotionally and spiritually apart from it.