Raj Persaud is a psychiatrist and author of The Mental Vaccine for COVID-19.
As reported on BBC News and other media outlets, Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died aged 88.
While it was also reported by the BBC that there was a huge sense of tangible shock at the Vatican, where the Pope, appearing frail from a balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica had addressed crowds and blessed a crowd gathered on the square outside at an Easter Sunday service.
The Pope died aged 88, and average male life expectancy from birth in Italy is currently calculated as being 81 years old, so the Pontiff lived longer than would be expected, statistically, with Italian males serving as the reference group.
However, since he was born in Argentina, where the average male life expectancy is 73, he lived a far longer life than one could anticipate for someone born in his country.
There are many reasons why this religious leader may have experienced better longevity than average, including the fact that the Vatican would have been able to supply health care second to none; however, perhaps an overlooked theory could locate the Pope’s extended longevity as linked to the effect of being prayed for.
It is traditional for Catholics to pray for the Pope during Church Mass, but it is also the case that the Pope, given his age and recent hospital admission, would also have been very much in the prayers and thoughts of millions of Catholics around the world.
There are 1.4 billion Catholics on the planet, so, a lot of people would have been praying for the Pope, indeed, the pontiff would have benefitted perhaps from more prayers than anyone else globally.
Although this is a controversial area of medical research, there have been studies that found praying for people has had a measurable beneficial effect on various aspects of their health, including longevity.
Distant healing or intercessory prayer, as it’s referred to in the academic literature, is reported to have positive effects on ill patients, in some scientifically designed clinical trials published in reputable medical journals. When there is no direct personal relationship between the person praying and the person being prayed for, the practice is known as intercessory prayer.
In other words, research has sometimes found that praying for complete strangers where they don’t even know they are being prayed for, has, in some studies, had a measurable health benefit.
Although controversial, there has been research suggesting that additional, blinded (the patients didn’t know they were being prayed for), remote, intercessory prayer may produce a measurable improvement in the medical outcomes of patients so ill as to be admitted to a coronary care unit.
In 1988, the results of a blinded, controlled trial of 393 patients who had been admitted to a coronary care unit (CCU) at San Francisco General Hospital, was published in an academic medical journal. Patients were randomly assigned to either a usual care group, which received no organized prayer, or to an experimental, intercessory prayer group, which received remote (from outside of the hospital) prayer from persons unknown to them. A statistically significant beneficial effect of intercessory prayer as assessed by a summary “hospital course” score was found.
The study was more recently repeated, this time, all patients admitted to the Coronary Care Unit at the Mid America Heart Institute (MAHI), Kansas City, Mo, over a 12-month period were eligible for the trial. Again it was found that prayer had a positive effect on the health outcomes of the patients, but the authors of study also contend that there was a more prosaic non-supernatural explanation possible: these findings would be expected to occur by chance alone only 1 out of 25 times that such an experiment was conducted, so sheer chance still remains a possible explanation of the results.
Also in the first San Francisco study, 13% refused to take part “for personal reasons or religious convictions” or were otherwise unwilling to give consent. This indicates that only “prayer-receptive” patients were included in this research, and maybe this may have something to do with the final result.
Also there was actually no statistically significant difference in actual length of stay in the coronary care unit between those patients prayed for and those who weren’t.
However, other reviews claim that three quarters of the rigorous studies reveal statistically significant results, suggesting a measurable healing effect of prayer. Yet other analyses point out that the clinical efficacy of distant healing is not consistently observable, and there is at least one study which finds that reliance on faith healing is also linked with higher mortality in children.
One review, published in the academic journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, concluded that results were inconsistent with two trials showing a significant effect of prayer on at least one outcome, with three trials showing no effect.
However, intercessory prayer is also sometimes associated, for example, with shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a blood infection, as well as with reducing disorderly conduct of dementia patients.
However in the last study the sample size was small, with only six late-stage dementia patients involved, and two patients died during the research.
The blood infection study was perhaps particularly strange.
All 3393 adult patients whose bloodstream infection was detected at the hospital in 1990-6, were randomised to a control group and an intervention or prayer group. A remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was said responsible for the well being and full recovery of the intervention group in the year 2000. This was a prayer about a past event. Mortality was 28.1% in the prayer group and 30.2% in the control group. This study was published in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal which often publishes more light-hearted takes on medicine at that time of the year.
If intercessory rote prayers for a specific named individual have an effect on longevity, then Roman Catholic bishops should live significantly longer, due to millions of prayers for their well-being and protection received by each of them every year. This theory depends on the number of people praying as part of the effect.
To better analyse this phenomenon, a recent scientific study chose two reference groups for comparison: other priests who did not become bishops, and academic teachers.
The authors of the research focused on Catholic Bishops because they argued it is safe to assume that no other group of individuals receives such a large number of prayers, and no other kind of prayers comes close in terms of sheer quantity.
The study was entitled “Intercessory Rote Prayer, Life Longevity and the Mortality of Roman Catholic Bishops: An Exploratory Study.” The researchers additionally argued that, if the effectiveness of prayer grows proportionally to the number of people praying, bishops from larger dioceses should experience longer lives than colleagues from the smaller ones.
In the research, 857 catholic bishops, 500 catholic priests who were not bishops, and 3,038 male academic teachers as a comparison group were investigated.
The researchers explained that the rationale behind choosing the professional groups for comparison was to compare a group of individuals who received an extensive number of intercessory prayers on a regular basis (bishops). It also include a group that shared a lot of lifestyle choices with bishops, but received a vastly smaller number of intercessory prayers (priests, who are not mentioned in Roman missal and thus are not prayed for by default by any mass attendant in a diocese), and a third professional control group: male academics, who, like priests and bishops, have higher education, and share some social status similarity, as well as semi-structured workday scheme with bishops.
The study found that Catholic bishops live significantly longer than Catholic priests. No difference was found between the length of life of male academic teachers and bishops or between priests and male academic teachers.
Also, there was no significant difference between the average longevity of bishops coming from the largest and from the smallest dioceses.
Hence, although it seems that bishops do live longer than priests (but not longer than academic teachers), it would also appear, according to these researchers, that the number of prayers one receives does not influence the duration of life.
The authors acknowledge that a possible limitation to the study is that the intensity or intentionality of the prayer was not accounted for.
After all, a large number of mass participants may not necessarily put a lot of devotion or passion into the particular appeal for a given bishop’s well-being, and the bishop is also unfamiliar to most of the praying. Additionally, the rote prayer, mechanically repeated as a part of mass procedure is definitely significantly different from a personal, intimate, and ardent prayer one would employ, if they actually wanted to ask for someone’s health.
The authors of the study point out that besides being prayed for more than priests, bishops also have a significantly higher wealth status than regular priests, so maybe a material factor could contribute to bishops’ longevity lead over the more regular priests.
But, the Pope is obviously particularly special, it is also the case that few jobs have data collected on them for well over a thousand years, and other research has confirmed a consistent tendency for Pope’s to live longer than other professions, on average, going back hundreds of years.
Life expectancy at birth was a brief 25 years during the Roman Empire, it reached 33 years by the Middle Ages and rose up to 55 years in the early 1900s; as medical sciences advanced over centuries, perhaps it tended to replace prayer.
But how many would have such faith in prayer’s ability to heal that they would go so far as to back prayer over modern medical intervention, and chose prayer over consulting a doctor?
After all, even the recently deceased Pope, with over a billion people praying for him, also recently himself went into hospital to benefit from modern medical intervention.
But maybe one possible lesson, indeed beyond all the science, is try to lead the kind of life where people you have touched throughout your lifespan, ardently want you to stay alive. Maybe it is the size of that figure, which is ultimately more important, than the mere number of years you live.
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