Father Wycazik arranges for Brendan to work as an orderly at a children’s hospital

Father Stefan Wycazik’s hospital assignment gives Brendan Cronin’s crisis of faith a practical test: for a week, he is to serve sick children not as a priest offering theological answers but as an ordinary orderly doing difficult work. At St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children, Brendan discovers a capacity to comfort the patients, and their courage changes what he understands about suffering without resolving his doubts about God.

The intervention and its terms

Father Stefan Wycazik proposes a limited course of help after warning Brendan that his distress could damage his prospects in the Church. Rather than continue with pep talks or debates about good and evil, he offers to apply his own theories about psychological disorders. The arrangement is explicitly provisional: Wycazik will help until Christmas, and if Brendan remains as distressed and no closer to an answer, he will arrange care from a Jesuit psychiatrist. Brendan agrees.

The first part of this plan is a week away from ecclesiastical suits and priestly duties. Wycazik arranges for Brendan to report to Dr. Jim McMurtry at St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children and to work as an orderly. McMurtry alone is to know that Brendan is a priest; he also guarantees that Brendan will receive as much work, including unpleasant work, as any other orderly. The assignment is therefore not a chaplaincy in disguise. It places Brendan among patients and staff under the ordinary name Brendan, with no clerical status to set him apart.

The work and the children

The first day makes the demands of the arrangement immediate. Brendan empties bedpans, changes urine-soaked linens, assists with passive exercises, feeds a partially paralyzed eight-year-old, pushes wheelchairs, encourages despondent patients, and cleans up after two children made nauseous by chemotherapy. He also sees children living with rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, burns, and injuries inflicted by abusive parents. The work brings suffering close enough that his familiar theological explanations feel inadequate. He twice retreats to a locked stall in the staff men’s room and weeps.

The children gradually give the week a different rhythm. After Brendan tells a funny story and lets them know his long-unused nickname, they begin calling him Pudge. His stories, jokes, rhymes, and puns win laughter or smiles; by the third day, the staff use the nickname too. He still performs the expected tasks, but he also draws the children out and entertains them. Their welcome becomes a reward that matters more to him than money. His grief does not vanish—on the third day he cries later in his hotel room—but it no longer occupies the whole of his response to the hospital.

Emmeline and the lesson of the week

On the seventh day, Brendan understands why Wycazik sent him there while brushing the hair of ten-year-old Emmeline Halbourg. A rare bone disease has left her legs nearly useless and her hands twisted; inflamed knuckles and wrists often prevent her from holding the brush herself. She takes pride in her thick, glossy black hair and likes to brush it a hundred strokes each day. After taking her by wheelchair to the X-ray department, where doctors are monitoring a new drug’s effects on her bone marrow, Brendan brushes it for her as she watches the winter scene outside.

Emmeline regards the seasons and the winter landscape as evidence of a good and generous creation. Her conviction is not presented as a cure for her pain or disability: she remains seriously ill, and her body’s suffering is plain. Yet she retains a confident faith in the goodness of the world. Brendan recognizes that many of the children share this faith. Their example offers a challenge to his despair, but it does not settle the question that troubles him. He remains moved less by proof of a compassionate God than by the children’s courage in the face of adversity.

The scene also preserves the conflict rather than turning the assignment into a neat conversion. After giving Emmeline a hundred strokes and then ten more, Brendan puts her back into bed and covers her bent legs. His anger at suffering surges again; he imagines that he would throw a sacred chalice if one were close at hand. Emmeline notices his movement and asks whether he has hurt himself, not whether he is angry or blasphemous. The exchange leaves his faith unresolved while showing the care he gives her in the same moment that he is inwardly rebelling against the suffering she endures.

Later significance

The hospital week establishes a practical form of service that remains relevant as Brendan becomes associated with extraordinary healings. Father Stefan Wycazik later links Brendan to the recovery of Emmeline’s previously crippled limbs and to the healing of Winton Tolk, and he senses a Presence concerned with Brendan. When Winton asks whether Brendan is a saint, Wycazik calls him a good man, not a saint; the question itself shows how Brendan’s acts of care and later miraculous reputation invite religious interpretation without settling what caused them.

Much later, Wycazik offers a further, explicitly interpretive account of Brendan’s crisis: he believes it may be connected to a memory of encountering a vastly different and superior race, an experience that could have shaken Brendan’s inherited understanding of humanity’s place in creation. That theory reframes the crisis but does not erase the earlier hospital lesson. The assignment’s strongest change is narrower and more concrete: Brendan does not recover faith through argument, but he learns that his compassion can take the form of feeding, cleaning, encouraging, entertaining, and brushing a child’s hair. The children’s faith does not answer his question for him; their courage gives him a way to remain present to suffering while the question stays open.