HOWZAT

There are studies to suggest that prayer, or meditation and relaxation techniques, can promote happiness and wellbeing as well as giving us a new perspective. Intercessional prayer, which aims at bringing about a particular result, is more problematic. For instance, this month Pentecostalists prayed for the BBC’s Stephen Nolan Show to go off the air for three months because they felt it had treated Iris Robinson badly. They are now praying for the wellbeing of its presenter, simply because he interviewed Madden.

The first study of the power of prayer that I can find was carried out, perhaps a little flippantly, by Francis Galton in 1872. Galton, noting that the British royal family were prayed for in churches across the country every Sunday, compared their life expectancy with that of commoners and concluded there wasn’t much difference.

Since then there have been a number of scientific studies comparing the progress of control groups of patients who were not prayed for with similar groups who were. This year the Cochrane Collaboration, a respected medical foundation often employed to assess the value of new drugs and treatments, compared all the studies which met its standards. It concluded: “We found 10 studies, involving more than 7,000 participants. Most of the studies show no real differences. Prayer was found to be helpful in one study of women receiving fertility treatment, whereas another trial found those aware of prayer had more complications following an operation.”

So statistically, the main effect of intercessionary prayer appeared to be to help with the implantation of embryos in IVF treatment, a procedure of which some religious fundamentalists disapprove.

One of the main studies taken into account by Cochrane was carried out in 2006 on heart patients in Boston by Herbert Benson, a committed Christian cardiologist, who believed evidence for the power of prayer was mounting. This was the study which found, counterintuitively, that people who knew they were being prayed for fared worse than those who didn’t. Overall, however, it found no difference.

Statistics are one thing, but it is natural that people will be convinced when an individual recovers after being prayed for or visiting a shrine. This natural credulity can be exploited either deliberately or unwittingly, to make money, expand churches and spread faith.

For instance, Madden started on his present path after being sent a free plane ticket to visit the Fresh Fire Ministries in Florida last April. There he linked up with Todd Bentley, another charismatic preacher, who turned away from a life of burglary, drugs and sexual abuse of younger boys, following a religious experience. A material as well as a spiritual success, Bentley collects money at his services in buckets, because there is so much of it, and runs missions across the world. Sometimes he appears to read the minds of volunteers in the audience.

His ministry is controversial, but it’s not the moral equivalent of the statues and the holy pictures that started to bleed in August 1920 at a house in Templemore, Co Tipperary. It became a place of pilgrimage, where healing miracles were reported. The truth was stranger still. The shrine was a scam run under IRA protection.

“We imposed a levy of two shillings and sixpence per day and in less than two weeks the sum collected amounted to at least £1,000, which was handed over to the Brigade arms fund,” the volunteer Sean South later told the Irish Bureau of Military History.

A miracle, indeed.

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