McCain was diagnosed in July 2017 with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

We’re preparing to launch Season 3 of our award-winning podcast, NCR In Conversation. Podcast listeners: Please take this quick survey to help us shape our programming.

The longtime Arizona Republican senator, reared in the Episcopal Church, attended a Southern Baptist megachurch in his later years. He viewed himself as a Christian but had “a distrust of the religious right and a faith that is too public, too political,” author Stephen Mansfield, author of books about the faiths of presidents and presidential candidates, told Religion News Service in December 2017.

In a family memoir, a campaign ad as well as a televised interview with megachurch pastor Rick Warren, he recalled a guard in his prisoner of war camp in Vietnam who shared his faith one Christmas. “He’s a very spiritual per-son but… in his core, he’s a military man,” said Alexander, author of “Man of the People: The Maverick Life and Career of John McCain.” “They don’t feel comfortable talking about religion.” In his family memoir, “Faith of My Fathers,” he recounted how he “prayed more often and more fervently than I ever had as a free man.”

“He was a very good preacher, much to my surprise,” Day told RNS in 2008, when he was 83. “He could remember all of the liturgy from the Episcopal services … word for word.” Day died in 2013 and McCain spoke at his funeral.

On one Christmas in captivity, McCain recalled in the memoir, as “room chaplain” he was given a few minutes to copy passages from a Bible.

“It was more sacred to me than any service I had attended in the past, or any service I have attended since,” he wrote.

The Legio Maria Mass at Ephesus Church on an August Sunday morning featured Prophet Moses Otieno singing hymns and reciting the rosary before an altar adorned with pictures of Jesus, Mary and church founder Simeo-Ondeto and his mother, Maria.

Then Otieno began to speak in tongues and cast out demons as congregants wailed, spun and fell to the floor.

“I can see in the spirit women here are barren,” Otieno declared. “Rush to the altar and get a miracle. Today you are going to receive babies. I have been sent by the Messiah through visions to deliver barren women today.”

The Legio Maria movement (Latin for “Legion of Mary”) sprouted in western Kenya in the 1960s after Ondeto, his mother and other members were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for practicing exorcism.

Ondeto, who died in 1992, is now believed to be the Messiah. Specifically, Legio Maria adhe-rents believe Jesus and Ondeto are the same person who has appeared in different ages bearing a different skin colour.

The group is often mistaken as being Catholic because it celebrates the main elements of the traditional Latin Mass. It has nuns and its own Pope, Romanus Ong’ombe, who lives at church headquarters in Got Kwer, located in Migori County, in south-western Kenya.

Reports of miracles have attracted local Catholics. An estimated 90,000 nominal members left the Catholic Church to become the first cohort of believers.

A recent study by the University of California Santa Barbara has found that a Catholic education helps to improve students’ self-discipline. According to associate professor Michael Gottfried’s and doctoral student Jacob Kirksey’s findings, Catholic schools are better at instilling traits of self-discipline in their students than US public schools and other private schools.

Their study focused on answering two questions. One: Are children in Catholic elementary schools more self-disciplined than comparable students in other schools, as measured by their likelihood to engage in verbal and physical confrontations and control their tempers? And two: Is the relationship between Catholic school attendance and self-discipline stronger in certain subsets of students?

The study’s data set was drawn from two cohorts, comprising 15,000 – 17,000 kindergarteners who attended public schools and 1,000 – 2,000 who attended non-public schools, of which close to 50% attended a Catholic school.

“The most obvious feature that Catholic schools and similar faith-based schools have in common is their focus on religion including such specifically Judeo-Christian values as humility, obedience, kindness, tolerance, self-sacrifice and perseverance,” the authors added.