Praying for a Prize

The man who buys a lottery ticket and prays to God to win may be a better Christian than the man who frowns on this as sinful, said a Dominican priest last week. The Dutch Reformed Church Synod on Public Immorality in Transvaal, South Africa had condemned lotteries as dishonest, and warned that "calling on God to satisfy our own selfish desires through the medium of lotteries and gambling is profanity and a sacrilege." Father Gerard Marie Antonius Jansen snapped back in the Afrikaans-language Catholic magazine, Die Brug (The Bridge) : "What appears to us as chance or coincidence is no coincidence to God . . . Someone who prays to God to allow him to win a prize in order that he may take better care of his family is not by any means a profaner, but recognizes that God may also make use of 'coincidence' in furtherance of his plan for the world."

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