THE PARISH CLERGY MINISTRY OF PRAYER WITH HOSPITALIZED PARISHIONERS

Previous reports suggest that clergy frequently pray with parishioners during hospital visits. In this study, 286 parish clergy and lay volu nteers characterize these prayers as meditative, Liturgical, or extemp oraneous. Content for the latter two categories is further described a s intercession, confession, or thanksgiving/praise. Respondents report ed 44,403 hospital pastoral visits during the previous year and most, regardless of faith group, estimated that they prayed during 100% of t hese visits. Further, these prayers were usually extemporaneous interc ession; meditative and liturgical prayers were used less frequently. D espite the demonstrated association between prayer and mystical experi ences, clergy mysticism scores were significantly lower than those rep orted in the literature and were not significantly related to the styl e or content of prayers during hospital visits.