The Battle Over Faith Healing

In the Lord's hands

"Just before Christmas 1996, 1-year-old Patrick Foster caught a bad cold. As the sniffling persisted week after week, Daniel and Anne Marie Foster did what they had always done when one of their three children got sick, they prayed the devil would be driven away.

But Patrick was not healed. As winter turned to spring, he became more lethargic and gaunt. It was March when Daniel and Anne Marie noticed the growth bulging from their son's left side.

As the growth swelled, the Fosters increased their prayers. Four times each week they attended services at Faith Tabernacle Congregation Church in north Philadelphia, asking their pastor to pray aloud for Patrick.

Regardless of how sick Patrick got, there would be no visit to a doctor. And no medical treatment, not even an aspirin. Members of Faith Tabernacle, like thousands of faith-healing Christians across the United States, trust that God, inspired by the prayers of true believers, will heal sickness and disease. To seek a doctor's care would be to turn their backs not only on their faith, but on God himself. Patrick was in the Lord's hands, Anne Marie Foster would tell police.

But one day in early May, the Fosters' private religious beliefs came crashing through the doors of the Philadelphia prosecutor's office.

A neighbor had seen the listless boy sitting on his father's lap on the front steps. Patrick's body was so wracked by the growth that had ballooned from his kidney and attached itself to his liver and heart, that he needed his father's help just to lift his head.

The neighbor called the child abuse hot line.

Twenty-four hours from death

Social worker Michael Bonetti first looked in on Patrick only hours after the neighbor's phone call. The Fosters reluctantly let Bonetti inside their well-kept two-story brownstone.

Daniel Foster carried Patrick downstairs and laid him face down on the sofa. The boy winced, then groaned.

The growth, which at 6 pounds was now almost a third of Patrick's weight, was hidden by the rust-colored blanket pulled up over his shoulders. A pinkish rash covered the boy's cheeks and hands. His left eye was swollen shut; his lips were cracked and white from dehydration.

Bonetti urged the Fosters to rush Patrick to a hospital. They refused. The following afternoon Bonetti returned with the police and a court order demanding that the Fosters release Patrick to a doctor's care.

At St. Christopher's Hospital, doctors said Patrick likely would have died in another 24 hours. The large mass growing from his abdomen was a Wilm's tumor, a common form of childhood cancer that 90 percent of patients survive if they receive prompt treatment.

Doctors removed the tumor but doubted Patrick would live. He spent six months in the hospital, his parents and extended family always at his side. The prayers were never-ending.

But the battle over what was best for Patrick Foster was just beginning."