Australia to get it’s first Sky Fairy.

A Letter to Noor Almaleki

Australia is poised to get its first saint. Mary MacKillop, a Catholic nun who, in the 1800s was instrumental in founding the “Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart”, an order of Australian nuns, will likely be confirmed as a saint by the Catholic Church some time this year.

While the procedure in the Catholic Church for being declared a saint is cumbersome and time consuming, there are essentially three major steps. First, the Church must declare that the person was of "heroic virtue", which essentially means that they lived an outstanding life, consistent with the then prevailing doctrines and political views of the Catholic Church.

Second, the Catholic Church must find that the applicant-saint was responsible for two miracles. The first miracle allows “beatification”, or being put on the path to sainthood, and the second miracle allows “canonization” or the formal declaration of sainthood.

Under Catholic doctrine, the saint itself cannot perform miracles (why that would be silly). Only the Catholic god can (that, apparently, is not silly). So the story goes that the saint pleads with the Catholic god to perform the particular miracle, God listens and performs it. There is said to have been an “intercession” by the saint. This proves to the Church that the applicant-saint is indeed in heaven and has the ear of the almighty. That this must happen twice is a kind of “double check” that the saint-in-waiting really is interceding on behalf of praying human beings, lest mistakes be made.

Nowadays, given our knowledge of the World, the “miracles” the Church relies on are virtually always medical recoveries. Not so in the past, where purely natural events such as storms, eclipses, and meteors were regularly accepted as “miracles” by the indulgent, gullible and scientifically illiterate church. Such events would be laughed at today, so the Church is forced to retreat into one of the last dark corners where it can still claim miraculous intervention, that of medical uncertainty.

The normal course of events today is that a person is dying of a disease and that person prays (only) to the saint-in-waiting. The sick person later gets better, and “the doctors cannot explain why." Hence, the cure is attributed to the intercession of the putative saint. Essentially, “I don’t know” equals God.

Of course, it is never something unambiguously miraculous, like the re-growing of a severed limb, or the recovery of a lost eye or ear. Never. The “miracle” is always hidden inside the body and fits snuggly into that uncertain zone where something is medically difficult to explain. That area where a miracle can be claimed and never quite disproved.

Right now, Pope John Paul II has been put on the path to sainthood by Pope Benedict XVI. Normally they would have to wait years from his death to begin the process, but, bowing to Polish political pressure, the Pope, demonstrating perhaps the efficiency he learned while a member of the Hitler Youth (he was, Google it) has started the process early. So the hunt for miracles is on.

I will make a prediction. In fact, I will bet London to a brick that; (i) in their search for two miracles, they will quickly find them, just like George Bush’s underlings, under pressure, found “slam dunk” evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and (ii) the two miracles will both be medical “miracles”. The type that lurk in the above shadows. No severed limbs will re-grow, no angels will appear to raise the dead. Nothing clear and unambiguous. Just good, old fashioned cures perfectly explicable by medical uncertainty.

That was clearly true in Mary’s case. Mary, according to the Church, was responsible for the cure of a woman’s leukemia in 1961 and for the 1992 recovery from cancer of a woman called Kathleen Evans, who maintains that she prayed constantly and wore a picture of Mary and an old piece of Mary’s clothing.

Stop for a minute and think of the sheer absurdity of all this. In a nutshell, the Catholic Church is saying this. A sick woman prayed to a nun. The nun, although dead for over 50 years, read the woman’s mind, or “heard her prayers”, to the extent you see a difference. The dead nun then pleaded with the creator of the Universe, who presumably allowed the cancer to form in the first place, and who, although all-knowing and perfect, is capable of having its “mind” changed. This all-knowing creator sees its mistake and uses its magic powers, or “sacred powers” to the extent you see a difference, to alter the fundamental cell chemistry of the patient and cause her cancer to go away.

You buying this? Would you, if I inserted “Vishnu” for “God” in the paragraph above, as millions of Hindus believe?

Might I posit an alternative explanation. Cancers and many other diseases are simply unpredictable. They are unpredictable in how they start and who they afflict, in if and how rapidly they spread, in if and how they respond to treatment and in if and how they go into temporary or permanent remission. Spontaneous remission of cancer is a recognized medical fact. It occurs rarely, but regularly enough to be recorded by the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, and other science-based institutions as a recognized medical phenomenon. Indeed, this unpredictable nature of the illness is what makes it so frustratingly hard to cure. If we knew how and why it started, spread and stopped, we would probably know enough about it to have cured it by now. In such a case, the Catholic Church would be forced to find its “miracles” under other dark rocks.

Moreover, spontaneous remission of disease happens across the board. It happens to Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Jews, agnostics and devil worshippers. It happens no more regularly to those who pray than it does to those who do not. It happens to good people and bad. From the smartest, most upstanding members of society down to murders, rapists and plaintiffs’ lawyers. It intercedes with obvious blind indifference to the merit or worth of its beneficiaries.

Does the mere fact that many of these people prayed to their respective gods prior to the spontaneous remission of their disease mean their particular god intervened? Can the atheist who crossed his fingers claim a miracle from the index finger cured has cancer? Can the Muslim claim intervention by Allah?

It is a basic law of logic that, just because A happens before B, it does not mean that A caused B. In the oft cited example, the cock crowing before sunrise does not mean the cock caused the sun to rise. The fact that many, probably the vast majority of people with terminal illness, pray coupled with the fact that spontaneous and unexplained cures occur, albeit rarely, means that, statistically, there is bound to be overlap from time to time. People who pray will undergo unlikely and unexplained cures from time to time, as will those who don’t. A stopped clock is right twice a day.

In fact, given that most terminally ill believers pray, it would be far stranger if spontaneous remission avoided believers and seeming miracle cures never occurred. Human nature being what it is, however, the dots are joined, and the miracle proclaimed. Just as the proud cock may proclaim that he caused the sun to rise, the gullible believer takes it as a fait accompli that his prayers cured his illness.

The sporting world is full of athletes who have “lucky shoes” or who eat special meals or undergo specific routines before a game based on the fact that, one time when they did so, they performed very well. A preceded B, so A caused B.

In fairness, I expect that, if I were religious, and prayed to a “saint” and later had my disease go away, I would take some convincing that I was not cured because I prayed. Add societal pressure and constant messages of reinforcement that it is somehow “proper” or “good” to believe in gods and miracles (and the natural tendency not to be “ungrateful” just in case) and the declaration of a miracle is all but certain.

Then, of course, there is the other side of the equation. The so-called “unanswered prayer”.

Most of the United States Armed Forces come from blue collar backgrounds. They are generally the sons, and increasingly, the daughters of lower to middle income families, often from rural or small town America. As such, they tend to be strong Christians. Not all, but certainly the majority of members of the US Armed Forces are Christians and/or have come from devotedly Christian families.

I know first hand that the loss of a child is probably the greatest emotional pain the human mind is capable of experiencing, and something from which a parent will never truly recover. I have little doubt of the nightly anguish and worry the parents of these soldiers must go through when their child is away at war. They must worry constantly that tomorrow may be the day that a black car from the Defense Department arrives to tell them their child has been killed in action. Sleeping must be a difficult and stilted experience.

Given their religious convictions, these parents must pray on a regular basis.

As at writing, approximately 4,500 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and 1,500 in Afghanistan. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the parents of these dead soldiers prayed regularly. They must have asked their god for the safe return of their child every day. I can think of no greater circumstance where, if the Christian god were real, a prayer should be answered. A devout, pious Christian parent, who has lived according to the dictates of the Bible, pleading with God for nothing more than that their son or daughter not be blown to pieces while doing their duty for their country. It does not seem a lot to ask of an omnipotent, loving god.

Yet the body bags mount. And they mount with complete indifference to the religion or piousness of the soldiers and their families. There is absolutely no reason to think, and it is offensive and repulsive to assume, that these good families who literally made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, were somehow ignored for being less pious or deserving than their surviving brothers-in-arms. Of course, on the other side, thousands of Muslim parents are suffering the same gut wrenching losses as their prayers to “Allah” go unanswered and their children are killed.

Now, of course, we can come up with the usual, nauseating ways to explain away the various gods' inactions - they move in mysterious ways, it is all part of their grand plan, we cannot know why they do what they do etc. Funny, however, that total inaction is just what we would expect if there were no god.

Let's be honest. Praying for miracles is useless. Useless regardless of your god. Useless for the simple reason that there is nothing there to hear your prayers. You are pleading to a vacuum, imploring a zero. You are fooling yourself if you think they are periodically “answered”. You are relying, like an addicted gambler, on the periodic reinforcement of A before B means A caused B. In this sense, and as discomforting as it may be, religion can really be seen as little more than a reluctance to accept the fact that the Universe simply does not give a damn.

Which brings us back to (soon to be) Saint Mary MacKillop. She has, apparently performed two recognized miracles. She waited 50 years after her death to perform the first and a further 30 more to perform the second. Perhaps, this is statistically about how long it would take for a true believer who prayed predominantly to a relatively obscure personality like Mary to undergo the rare spontaneous remission of their disease. Meanwhile, many thousand of other worthy Australians were ignored and died. Mary doesn’t seem to be very attentive. Then again, who can blame her. After all “Saint Mary” was once excommunicated by the Catholic Church following a falling out with the Church hierarchy. It seems saintliness or sinner status has as much to do with politics in the Catholic church as it does with “miracles”.