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Barna research says slightly more than four out of five adults in the U.S. (84%) claim they had prayed in the past week. That has been the case since Barna began tracking the frequency of prayer in 1993.

U.S. News and the Internet site Beliefnet funded a poll to learn more about why, how, where and when people pray. Here is a summary of the findings: · 75% percent were Christian. · 64% say they pray more than once a day.· 56% say they most often pray for family members, with 3.3% saying that they pray for strangers.· A little over 38% say that the most important purpose of prayer is intimacy with God.· 41% say that their prayers are answered often.· 1.5% say that their prayers are never answered.· Over 73% say when their prayers are not answered, the most important reason is because they did not fit God’s plan.· 5% say that they pray most often in a house of worship.· 79% say that they pray most often at home.· 67% say that in the past six months, their prayers have related to continually giving thanks to God. (Pastor's Weekly Briefing, 12/24/04)

A Newsweek poll titled "Is God Listening?" indicated that, of those who pray, 87% believed that God answers their prayers at least some of the time. Even so, unanswered prayers did not deter them from praying. 85% insisted that they could accept God's failure to grant their prayers. Only 13% declared they have lost faith because their prayers went unanswered. 82% don't turn away from God even when their prayers go unanswered. 54% say that when God doesn't answer their prayers, it means it wasn't God's will to answer.The things people pray for include health, safety, jobs, and even success, valid or not. 82% said they ask for health or success for a child or family member when they pray. 82% believed that God does not play favorites in answering prayers. 79% said God answers prayer for healing someone with an incurable disease. 75% asked for strength to overcome personal weakness. 73% answered that prayers for help in finding a job are answered. On the lighter side, 51% agreed that God doesn't answer prayers to win sporting events. 36% have never prayed for financial or career success.

With 5,126,884 adherents, or 27.56 per cent of the population, Catholics remain Australia's largest denomination, the 2006 census says. Anglicans accounted for 18.7 per cent, equal in number to those who declared no religion.

While more than one in four Australians said they were Catholic in the last census, a shadow falls between their words and actions. The church requires Catholics to attend Mass, but only 14 per cent of them obey the commandment to keep holy the sabbath day. Two Sundays ago at St Canice's Church in Elizabeth Bay, scores of people supped at the soup kitchen underneath the church but fewer than 80 attended 10.30am Mass. Only four of the congregation looked under 20 years old. The night before at St Therese's, a little wooden church at Lansdowne, on the mid-North Coast of NSW, eight people, including three young members of the Connolly family, watched Father Paul O'Neill say Mass.

World Youth Day aims to bring young people back to the Catholic Church, and while some liberals think the hoopla and singing is some sort of second-rate attempt to mimic Hillsong, the Sydney Pentacostal Christian church that is extraordinarily popular with the young, others think Billy Graham laid the groundwork all those years ago. The evangelist arrived in Sydney on February 12, 1959, for a 15-week crusade. Australia was still in the grip of British understatement and had never seen anything like Graham's theatricality. Much of the country was swept up in the kind of feverish excitement that greeted the Beatles five years later. The Billy Graham crusade built and built. His first appearance in Melbourne filled the 5000-capacity West Melbourne Stadium; the next the outdoors Sydney Myer Music Bowl, and finally the Melbourne Showgrounds. In all 714,000 Melburnians, almost everyone who lived in the place, saw Graham. Pretty much the same thing happened in Sydney. About 50,000 showed up at the Moore Park showground, and 150,000 crowded the showgrounds and the adjoining Sydney Cricket Ground for his last Sydney appearance. One million listened on radio. The American's success prompted anthropological coverage in Time magazine, which noted how well Graham had gone down with teenagers. "At one meeting some 2000 of them stepped forward after he had pitched them a line of rock 'n' rollery," it recorded. "In America, teenagers have a language all their own and think that grown-ups are all squares because they can't dig the jive. I heard of one of these cats who went to church and said to the minister: 'Dad, you really blasted me this morning, you were real cool, Dadcool, I mean cool, Dad. That jive of yours so beat me that I dropped $20 in the plate!' And the minister replied, 'Crazy, man, crazy.' " By the time Graham left Australia, 130,000 people, nearly 2 per cent of the population, had reputedly answered his call to come to the stage and make a commitment to Jesus Christ. The historian Stuart Piggin used Australian Bureau of Statistics figures to show the crusade contributed to a drop in alcohol consumption, extramarital births and crime.