Our friend and frequent contributor Father Edward Oakes (see here , here , and here for recent “On the Square” articles), sends the link to his colleague Father Robert Barron’s Why Christians should pray for Christopher Hitchens . What Hitchens’ suffering means, and what God intends, he does not claim to know.
I have a suggestion, which I don’t make (thought it may appear so) facetiously. Catholics praying for Hitchens should ask soon-to-be-Blessed John Henry Newman for his intercession. A miraculous healing won’t help the Cause for the Canonization of John Henry Newman , but he seems to me an appropriate man to ask to help another passionate and courageous English writer who has in faithfulness to his principles stepped outside the bounds of establishment opinion. They are alike in that, if not much else.
And in our prayers, we should remember that there are other healings besides the physical. Atheism is something of which a man needs to healed, and more urgently than of cancer.
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