AT the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukaemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation in one of the world's worst famines.

Thirty years later in the 1990s, when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide, a quarter of a million in the Yugoslav wars.

Doubtless there were Christians praying to God, Jesus, angels, saints or favoured religious personages to intercede in these calamitous events. And on top of them, were millions upon millions of supplicants with more personal requests - a win at the races, a sober husband, top marks in HSC English, please.

All these prayers, we have to imagine, were being transmitted through the ether, and finding their intended host only to be coldly ignored. In the case of the two lucky Australians, we are asked to believe, MacKillop received the signal, and was moved to respond.

Why were these women spared when the ruler of the universe allowed millions upon millions of children to die of hunger? And what of those cancer sufferers who prayed to MacKillop but for some inscrutable reason did not go into remission? Has the Vatican checked out this control group?