Consider a preposterous thought: God calls a general election. (Don't ask why, if you know what's good for you.) He orders every saint in heaven to form his or her own political party and sends them forth to campaign on Earth.
Who do you think would get the most votes?
St. John the Baptist? Now there's a strong contender. St. Francis of Assisi? Maybe, if birds could vote. St. Anthony, who some believe saved Little Italy from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904? A hometown favorite at least.
Though nobody could predict the outcome of such a hypothetical, not to say nonsensical, proposition, it's likely a formidable voting bloc would form up behind one name, at least in this country. You might call it a shadow constituency for a dark-horse saint.
This idea, of this saint's unexpected popularity, is propagated in a new book by Washington Times reporter Liz Trotta. The name she raises, she says, is increasingly on the lips of people in difficulty, ordinary folk up against life's hard edges. It is that of Jude Thaddaeus, the elusive martyr who is invariably the next-to-the-last named when Christ's 12 apostles are listed, the mysterious personage who, many believe, has been unfairly ignored by the official chroniclers of the Roman Catholic Church.
Writing in "Jude: A Pilgrimage to the Saint of Last Resort," Trotta reports that "countless new souls" are being drawn to this saint in these times of uncertainty. To arrive at her conclusion, Trotta did research in Baltimore, home of the St. Jude Shrine at Paca and Saratoga streets.
L And why has St. Jude been slighted for nearly two millennia?
Perhaps because he was given the same name as that other Jude -- Iscariot the Snitch, who, we have it on good authority, is still doing hard time in hell. Or perhaps Jude casts a dim light because he is rarely mentioned in the New Testament, and wrote only one epistle, and even his authorship of that is contested.
Also, he has no truly epic miracles to his credit, though he did cure King Abgar of ancient Edessa (Urfa today, in southeast Turkey) of leprosy. But that was 2,000 years ago, and the afterglow has naturally faded. Besides, these days doctors can cure leprosy.
Jude seems to have specialized in smaller customized outcomes, individual intercessions, the little miracles: a recovery from cancer here, a job for an unemployed breadwinner there, a dose of moral starch to defeat a weakness for this illegal substance or that.
Jude is one saint who knows how to service his clients. He provides alleviations. He administers the antibiotic of hope, and it has paid off. Not, as already said, in glaring saintly celebrity, but with the deeper-rooted renown of countless people, the quiet applause of a widening core of devotees that includes many non-Catholics. Father Frank Donio, at Baltimore's St. Jude Shrine, reports that of the half-million people on the shrine's mailing list, about 7,000 are non-Catholic.
All this suggests that Jude is not only a mystery, he is a paradox: He is obscure and at the same time popular. And, as Trotta argues, he's on a roll.
Why? Because, as Trotta says, America is going through a crisis of the spirit, an aberrant season of hysterical reactions to the millennium's end, a paralyzing disillusionment that flows from the realization that consumerism -- even when equated with patriotism, as it frequently is -- fails to satisfy as a reason for living.
"America," she writes, "is caught up in one of the most fervent religious revivals in its history a stirring of spirits, a yearning of hearts and, in a deeper sense, a chorus of bewilderment and desperation from a people long seen as the most blest among nations."
In light of that, who could be more appropriate to turn to than the saint who is the archenemy of despair, that "Unknown Soldier of the spirit" for a "people ever more frantic for hope in an ever more desperate world"?
To Trotta, not only is St. Jude the saint for our times, he is very much an American saint.
"He's the saint of action, the saint that gets results," she says. "Those are American traits."
A steady following
John Haas, a research associate at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, at Notre Dame University, might agree, up to a point. "It is just stunning the number of people who are interested in St. Jude, who participate in his devotions," he says.
Rather than seeing a tidal surge to the saint of lost causes, however, people with custodial interest in Jude Thaddaeus report a "steadiness" in the population of Jude devotees. Incremental movement forward is enough for them.
Father Mark Brummel, director of the St. Jude League in Chicago, says the league's membership has grown about 10 percent over the past five years. Donations to the Pallotine Order's overseas missions sent to the shrine, he says, are up "considerably."
At the Paca Street shrine, Father Frank detects no mass anxiety, but he does perceive a more determined "spiritual search, especially among young people." He estimates the number of visitors has increased by about 10 percent in the year he's been there.
They trickle in throughout the day, in ones or twos, genuflect, then turn into the glimmering chamber off to the right, where the object of their devotion waits. Workmen come, and men without work; aging women in print dresses who light candles; young girls possibly confused by unanchored mores; men in suits.
They all stand before the statue of their saint in the small luminous alcove. Just outside, in the immense sanctuary hall of the 151-year-old church, it is cool, even on days when the asphalt on Paca Street is melting. A "prayerful atmosphere" obtains, encouraged by recorded and subdued chant. People shuffle about, tiptoe, kneel, pray, sleep. There is no water, but one has the impression of water by the play of light on the walls as it filters through the windows. During a service, the murmur of prayer rises as if it is coming up out of a well.
The St. Jude of the Paca Street shrine looks like some lacquered Hollywoodian ideal of an apostle. He is all marble, and as stereotyped as a movie judge, with his white enameled hair and permed beard. This is not the desert evangelist who marched into Persia, nor the martyr beaten to death in the sand by vengeful shamans -- which as far as anyone can tell is what really happened to Christ's cousin. In Baltimore, Jude stands in the radiance cast by a mosaic speckled with gold, and in the glow of green candles, electric for an electric age.
For the most part, people come to the Baltimore shrine to ask for things, or to thank the saint for favors already granted. It is part of the ritual, these expressions of gratitude; it is expected. Many are published in newspaper personal columns. It is one reason Jude is so widely known, says Notre Dame's John Haas, even though so little is actually known about him.
The requests by Jude's devotees to the Paca Street shrine are the ordinary sort made by ordinary people trying to get on; or they mirror their desperation as their lives dissolve into crisis and hurting. Some write down their sentiments in the shrine's guest book.
Jude please forgive the person that stole my wallet today and let them understand that God does not like theft or stealing
It's been this way on Paca Street for a while. Father Flavian Bonifazi, another priest assigned to the shrine, says it began in the 1940s, this passionate attention to Jude. The church at that time was dedicated to John the Baptist. It served a Sicilian community, whose people long ago dispersed.
The parish was dissolved in 1987 and the church became known as the Nationwide Center of St. Jude Devotions, as distinguished from the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago, the official "national shrine," the place where the devotion to St. Jude was believed first established in this country.
"The Italian people used to pin the pictures of the soldiers onto the statue of St. Jude," said the priest. "This was during the war, in 1943. It was just a private thing, for the people of Baltimore."
Then it became something else. Bigger.
Some years after the war the Pallotines began to promote the shrine, and with much success. By the time Father Bonifazi arrived in 1963 for his first of three tours of duty, people were arriving by the busload from far beyond Baltimore.
Today, the buses still come, about 100 a year. Their passengers go in for a novena, a Mass, private devotions to St. Jude. They look in on the gift shop downstairs. Afterward, they often head off to Harborplace, have crabs, maybe go to a ball game. Many make a day of it.
St. Jude pray for my son. Pray that God will rescue him from addictions pray and intercede that God will answer this mother's prayers.
Liz Trotta's description of Jude as the American saint is not entirely hyperbole. He may be to Americans what St. Patrick is to the Irish, a passion unshared by people in other lands.
Italians, Father Bonifazi points out, are always puzzled when the Irish arrive in Rome talking about their national saint. Nobody ever heard of St. Patrick in Italy, he says, even though he was the son of a Roman soldier. So it is with Jude: "They never heard of him either, even though he's buried in Rome." In St. Peter's Basilica.
Just in time
Jude's immigration to America seems to reflect his just-in-time predilections: He came in on the edge of a crisis. As the story is told by Robert A. Orsi, a professor of religious studies at the University of Indiana and author of "Thank You, St. Jude," the first devotion was established by John Tort, a Spanish priest of the Claretian Order who reached Chicago in 1925 to take charge of a church dedicated to Our Lady of Guadaloupe.
Father Tort experienced the worst years of the Mexican Revolution before he departed for the United States. On his slow journey through the Southwest he encountered St. Jude on a holy card he found in a church pew in Prescott, Ariz. This he assumed had been left by a Mexican migrant. There was a cult of the saint in Central America, he knew, and down in Santiago, Chile, Jude was the patron saint of prostitutes.
Tort set up a small devotion to St. Jude at Our Lady of Guadaloupe Church in 1927. Unable to find or buy a statue of the saint, he had one made, copied from the old holy card.
His shrine grew with almost miraculous suddenness, especially after the stock market crashed and the Great Depression crept over the country like an ice age. These were Judean times: People were hurting -- much as Trotta insists they are today -- and all that lay ahead for them was World War II. The pre-eminence of Father Tort's shrine was irrevocably established 1929 by an alleged miracle that electrified Chicago: A Judean relic, applied to young Sarah Muldowney, cured her meningitis.
St. Jude please help my family for health & problems. 3 family members have already die. Please help.
Miracles are not much in favor these days in the Catholic church.
As Orsi puts it, "There has always been a current in the church critical of devotionalism, 'modern' clerics who equate it with superstition. After Vatican II, attempts were made to de-emphasize the role of saints as intercessors."
Younger priests today, operating in what many people still regard as a relentlessly secular age, are not eager to endorse some petitioner's claim that St. Jude has worked a miracle on his behalf. Miracles are not modern.
"We don't want to enter into the miraculous nature of the thing," says Father Frank, who is 32. "I believe God is present to us. I
believe God answers our prayers. To say something is miraculous is different I can't say that."
Belief in miracles
Perhaps it has to do with age, or having been around longer -- being not superstitious, nor gullible, rather accepting. Or simply having faith.
"Today you can't say miracles," murmurs Father Flavian as he kneels in a back pew preparing his mind for his noon Mass. "They say graces and special favors you receive from the saint. Not miracles.
"For me they are miracles. They come in here and they cry. Men cry. 'Father,' they say, 'my daughter has cancer. She needs therapy.' I say, 'Pray to St. Jude.' They come back and they say, 'She don't need therapy.' "
"It's not the priest. It's St. Jude. He's making propaganda for himself."
Pub Date: 9/12/98