The Schoolgirls' Hunger Strike and Petition to Halt the Carpenter's Work

The Schoolgirls' Hunger Strike and Petition to Halt the Carpenter's Work is a student protest in which Elinora rallies the boarders to demand that the carpenter stop work and Saint Joseph be given the chance to provide the chapel staircase. What begins as a dispute over religious conviction becomes an organized test of authority: the girls use fasting and a petition to press their Bishop, while his response reveals the practical obligations that limit even a religious leader’s choices.

Causes and Background

The dispute grows from the carpenter’s arrival at a chapel project that has become the focus of a novena to Saint Joseph. The Bishop, Jean Baptiste Lamy, has acknowledged that the missing staircase presents a dilemma and that the nuns are praying for a miracle. At Lizzy Enders’s suggestion, he has agreed to let a hungry carpenter examine the problem. His decision puts a working solution alongside the girls’ expectation that Saint Joseph will intervene.

Elinora treats the carpenter’s presence as evidence against the faith she wants the community to display. She argues that Saint Joseph cannot come while a carpenter is already at work, whether in the kitchen or the chapel. She also makes the conflict personal: she accuses Lizzy of bringing trouble to the convent, connecting the carpenter’s arrival and the Bishop’s refusal to recognize her religious calling with Delvina’s death. In Elinora’s account, the carpenter is an agent of Satan, and the response must be both continued prayer and action to remove him.

The protest takes shape among the girls who support her. Elinora proposes that, when the other students return on Monday, they fast and pray, taking liquids but refusing food until the carpenter is gone. The plan turns her individual conviction into a collective campaign, with the petition providing a direct request to the Bishop and the fast making the girls’ determination visible.

The Fast and Petition

The campaign is already underway when Lizzy enters the dining room. The five girls who board at the convent are drinking tea but refusing the meal of fresh fish, eggs, and pan de maiz. Their disciplined stillness makes the refusal conspicuous: their hands remain in their laps, their backs rigid against their chairs, and their eyes lowered. Elinora wears a black lace mantilla and moves her lips in prayer. The others reveal different strains in the performance—Winona keeps looking toward the platters, Rosalyn seems close to tears, and Lucy and Consuello look to Elinora for resolve.

Mother Magdalena stands over the girls and insists that they eat, but the refusal continues. Elinora tells her that copies of the petition are being circulated among students as they gather in their classrooms. She expects that by noon the refusal will spread beyond the boarders unless the Bishop grants the request. The petition asks him to stop the carpenter from all work for the week and allow Saint Joseph to come to their aid. The action therefore combines prayer, an appeal through a written document, and the threatened expansion of the fast to the wider school.

The girls’ protest is not presented simply as a private devotional exercise. Their fast is a means of exerting pressure on the institution, and the petition gives that pressure a defined demand and timetable. Their conduct also exposes the difficulty of sustaining a public act of religious discipline: Winona’s attention to the food and Rosalyn’s near tears sit beside Elinora’s determined prayer, showing that unity does not erase individual discomfort.

The Bishop's Decision

The Bishop accepts the petition. His decision does not establish that he accepts the girls’ interpretation of the carpenter or promises a miracle. As Sister Roberta explains to Lizzy, he cannot allow girls to fast until they faint in class. Some of the day students, she adds, depend on the food they receive at school for their only decent meal of the day. The protest thus makes the Bishop confront consequences extending beyond the five boarders who have begun refusing food.

Sister Roberta also frames the decision as a limit on personal authority: a Bishop cannot always do what he wants and must sometimes do what he would rather avoid. Accepting the request to suspend the work for the week is, in her account, a response to his responsibility for the students, not proof that Elinora has compelled him to affirm her theology. The same action can therefore look like a victory to the petitioners and a practical act of care to the adults responsible for them.

Aftermath and Significance

The accepted petition interrupts the carpenter’s work, but it does not settle whether Saint Joseph will appear. Later, the carpenter completes the staircase and leaves. When the girls and nuns gather to look at it, they see a polished, curving structure of thirty-three steps without a banister. Sister Roberta interprets its unsupported descent as a lesson in faith, and Mother Magdalena concludes that the carpenter was Saint Joseph. Their interpretation gives the girls’ earlier demand a seemingly miraculous answer, though the carpenter’s departure and the finished staircase do not, by themselves, prove his identity.

Lizzy does not share the community’s certainty. She remembers the carpenter as a person who spoke with her, listened to her troubles, held her kitten, and had told her of his sadness at leaving his own family; she cannot reconcile that ordinary human presence with the others’ conclusion that he was a saint. The author’s note identifies the novel as a fictional treatment of the Loretto staircase legend and explicitly leaves the carpenter’s identity open to the reader. In that light, the hunger strike is more than an unsuccessful or successful bid to control construction: it stages competing ways of recognizing a miracle. Elinora seeks one through prayer and collective insistence; the Bishop answers through care for students; and Lizzy remains caught between the community’s supernatural explanation and the humane, fallible carpenter she knew.