Just Say Hi
“Hello” will suffice
It is probably fair to say that being Pope is one of the worst jobs imaginable. Celibacy is a requirement, as may be regular attendance at pre-dawn religious functions. Though a uniform is supplied, it is a funny one and not really suitable for street wear. The position is not even salaried in any usual sense of the word.
Now though a new issue has come to light. Research recently published in the American Heart Journal has revealed that having people pray for patients undergoing heart surgery has a significantly negative effect on outcome. In a study of 1200 patients receiving a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), “Complications occurred in 59% of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer.” Links to the study are available (here).
The Pope of course is one of the most prayed-for men on the face of the Earth. The prayer “bandwidth” dedicated, for instance, to the last days of John Paul II must have been enormous and, given what the American research appears to show, it is astonishing that he managed to hold on as long as he did.
Scientific attempts to evaluate the impact of prayer on medical conditions have a well-established history. A famous statistical experiment in this sense was conducted by Sir Francis Galton in 1872. His hypothesis was that if prayer was effective, members of the British Royal family would live longer, since many thousands of Anglican churchgoers prayed for their well-being every Sunday. He therefore compared longevity of the Royal family with that of the general population, finding no difference. Given that royalty of the time were probably receiving far better health care than the public at large, even that must be considered a negative result.
To a degree, none of this is surprising since, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, “Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.” What is harder to explain is the hostility apparent in singling out for special punishment those for whom divine intercession has been asked. The American sample is a large one and there cannot be much doubt that this has happened.
In Catholic theology, as we have previously mentioned (here), miracles – of whatever sort they may be – are not a reward for piety but are instead a special symbolic language though which the Supreme Being communicates with mankind. If that is the case, the Lord would appear to be reminding us with a sharp object lesson that, in the words of Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center – who was not affiliated with the study – “There is no god in either the Christian, Jewish or Moslem scriptures that can be constrained to the point that they can be predicted.”
As for the Pope and his well-being, it would seem that the greatest favor we can do is to leave him alone. St. Francis of Assisi put it somewhat differently: “When we pray to God we must seek nothing – nothing.” There are good statistical reasons to believe that He may not appreciate being pestered.