Yes, he failed, but to his like even failure is success. As I've mentioned they've always got the fall-back positions of "divine will" and "part of the master plan" to haul out and dust off.

Yes, but no one ever mentions the reason why Pat started praying away hurricanes in the first place. Mainly, it was to tick off followers of Edgar Cayce, a mid-century Christian mystic who used to go into trances and then come back with bizarre diagnoses of illnesses for his followers. Cayce seems to have been a mostly harmless nut, gaining attention only through a few odd magazine articles in the forties. But he set up shop in Virginia Beach, founding a hospital, all they while prophesying that no hurricane would ever hit Virginia Beach again. Although Cayce was a Christian himself, he appears not to be the kind Pat likes, and indeed a sort of hippie new-age commune has sprung up around Cayce's legacy, making Virginia Beach home not only to Pat's Family Channel but to the Association for Research and Enlightenment, which engages in just the sort of crystal-channeling, wide-eyed tolerance of all paths to spirituality that makes Pat go mad. They have C.S. Lewis in their bookstore, though, which you'd think even Pat could get behind. They're equal opportunity spiritualists.