The shrine of St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless cases, gave up on candles years ago. The lights surrounding the martyr's statue are actually little glass bulbs that people switch on while praying - for an ailing child, perhaps, or a depressed spouse. Wax tapers were prettier, but dozens were often lit and "it got so hot in here," said Mary Gerk, who works at the Saratoga Street shrine. "All that flame and smoke."
Every bulb will likely be burning this weekend, when the west-side shrine expects to receive more than a thousand pilgrims in honor of today's feast of St. Jude. The saint of things despaired of is a major presence here in Baltimore, and tour buses filled with senior citizens and Hispanic prayer groups have been pulling up to the building for several weeks now in anticipation of the holiday.
The faithful come from New York City and beyond in order to hear a Mass - offered in English, Spanish or Creole - in the saint's honor, to slip prayers, scrawled on slips of paper, into the glass box at his statue's feet, and to kiss the golden case that is said to contain a fragment of his bone. This high season of pilgrimage is a boon for the shrine, which serves, for most of the year, as a repository for sadness, and a final refuge for hope.
"People are troubled by so many things," says the Rev. Louis Micca, pastoral director of the shrine, which is one of the largest and best-known in the country. "And we are called to help the hopeless."
Every day, through the mail, the Internet, and a prayer telephone line, the St. Jude shrine receives requests for the saint's help in all sorts of matters, many of them grim. Supplicants also come to plead in person, kneeling before the saint's statue inside the church, or lingering in the pews with bowed heads. Many of them are sick, living in Baltimore to be close to the hospitals; there is a special place near the pulpit for wheelchairs and even stretchers.
And then there are those visitors who may not realize precisely whom they've called on for help. Homeless people, addicts, and others in dire straits often wander into the shrine looking for food or cab fare or money for the gas bill. In this neighborhood, an endless supply of desperate cases waits just outside the door.
"Every day they come in, needing things," says Cookie Carpenter, who volunteers at the shrine's information desk. "Some of them want money; some want to pray. Some want someone to talk to."
And some stay outside, pestering emerging pilgrims for spare change or stealing the handicapped markers from their cars to sell.
It is difficult for the priests and volunteers to both care for these people and be wary, to fulfill and protect the shrine's mission at the same time. In the past some visitors have felt hopeless enough to attempt to steal the shrine's poor boxes, which are now bolted down; even the St. Jude relic is hooked up to an alarm. Two signs hang in a waiting area near the gift shop: One says "Not Responsible for Lost or Stolen Property;" the other, "Christ's Love Urges Us On."
The forgotten apostle
Catholics from as far away as Pennsylvania and Virginia regularly attend services at the shrine, but it is not a parish, a community designed to shepherd believers from baptism all the way through the last rites. Rather, the church, run by the Pallottine religious order, is a destination for those who seek it out on the feast day each October or during an hour of need. The priests offer counseling, and there are limited hand-outs for the poor, but mostly the building is meant for prayer.
People pray for everything under the sun - for incarcerated sons and sisters missing for 23 years and the neighbor's heart test. For husbands who have just been airlifted to the hospital and houses about to be foreclosed on. It's one of Carpenter's jobs to sift through the prayer line calls in the mornings; every once in a while, she says, St. Jude gets hit up for something unusual: one regular caller prays fervently for more hats.
But mostly the prayers well up from deep sadness. Someone mails in a picture of a sick baby. Someone asks for a longer life for a loved one, or an easy death.
"I pray for my wife - she needs three insulin shots a day," says Ishmael Jimenez, who traveled from Virginia to attend a noon Mass recently.
"I've prayed for my loneliness," said 25-year-old Imelda Turgo, a University of Maryland nurse who sought out the shrine after moving from the Philippines this year. "I've prayed so hard to St. Jude."
A contemporary of Jesus Christ, the saint is sometimes called the forgotten apostle, because little is known about his life, and because he is often confused with Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. Jude is believed to have preached and been martyred in Persia; in many likenesses, including the statue at the shrine, he holds the club he was supposedly beaten to death with.
Not even the shrine's priests are sure how, in the Catholic tradition of venerating saints, Jude got saddled with the hopeless cases. (The New Testament letter that bears his name urges believers to persist in difficult circumstances, which may be the root of the association). But they do say that the attachment to him on Saratoga Street developed during World War II, when the church was still the home of a thriving Sicilian parish. With so many soldiers deploying overseas, parishioners apparently thought the world was in need of some serious assistance.
Paying respects to St. Jude didn't become the church's main focus until the 1980s, by which time the Sicilians had mostly moved away - in fact, the neighborhood steadily worsened in the decades after the Jude prayers were introduced. Even the church building was in need of major repairs. If the place hadn't been converted into a shrine, Father Micca says, it might have been sold or abandoned, like so many urban parishes.
But St. Jude saved the day. He has a strong following, particularly among the country's growing Latino community, and with Creole-speaking Haitian immigrants. There are major shrines in Chicago and New Orleans, and Baltimore's commands much of the traffic on the East Coast. Since it was dedicated to him, the facilities have expanded, and its reputation as a destination for the desperate continues to grow.
Search for miracles
"How many miracles have there been since you've come here?"
The question comes from a member of a tour of hotel concierges from the Baltimore-Washington area. Father Micca thinks for a moment before answering.
"None authenticated, but we do hear stories of radical change." He told the tale of a young Johns Hopkins patient who came to the shrine while being treated for his diseased legs. "He's walking as normally as anyone else now," Father Micca said. "Others die." He mentions a 3-year-old cancer patient who often sat in the front pew, until one day she didn't come anymore.
The names of the sick and needy that the shrine receives are sent out to five communities of nuns, who include them in their prayers, and the money from fundraisers and the gift shop helps support a number of Catholic charities as well as the shrine itself. The priests - who also volunteer at a number of Baltimore nonprofits - do their best to help the despairing strangers who come to them. They make a point of playing uplifting music at services; they sometimes end Mass by telling a joke. And the sanctuary atmosphere is almost cheerful - there are always plenty of fresh flowers, the interior colors are warm and bright, and the Christ depicted in the gold-flecked mural at the front is not crucified, but risen.
And yet the sadness of the place can be overwhelming, especially outside, among the panhandlers and staggering addicts. The Rev. Joe Kuchar was assigned to the shrine two years ago. Before going on walks in the city, he and the monk who runs the gift shop sometimes wondered how, when so many people begged for money, they were supposed to know whom to give it to.
So they prayed to St. Jude.
abigail.tucker@baltsun.com