What Did Women Think They Were Doing When They Prayed to Saint Jude? Author(S): Robert Anthony Orsi Source: U.S

What Did Women Think They Were Doing When They Prayed to Saint Jude? Author(s): Robert Anthony Orsi Source: U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 8, No. 1/2, Spirituality, Devotionalism, & Popular Religion (Winter - Spring, 1989), pp. 67-79 Published by: Catholic University of America Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25153867 . Accessed: 22/10/2014 15:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Catholic University of America Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to U.S. Catholic Historian. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:17:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions What Did Women Think They Were Doing When They Prayed to Saint Jude? Robert Anthony Orsi 1. Introduction In 1955, a woman from Bay City, Michigan wrote to the Shrine of Saint Jude in Chicago recalling her long and continuing devotion to the Saint.1 Her letter is typical of the correspondence the Shrine had been receiving from women since its institution in 1929. She begins by describing the precise circumstances in which she first encountered the Saint. Fourteen years ago after I had gone from doctor to doctor and had been told Iwould never have a child, a friend told me about Saint Jude. Typically the devout would have first prayed to another holy figure, perhaps to an old family favorite, like the Infant of Prague, or an old world figure like Saints Gregory or Anthony. When they felt that they had reached the limits of their ability to endure whatever was happening to them, however, they called on Jude, whose titles include "the Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases." This woman remembers herself as having come to this point. "Completely desolate," she says, "I turned to him." She continues her story, I didn't just mumble words that had no meaning. I put myself in his hands. My big, healthy, 12-year old son is a living example of my complete faith in this Saint. Since then he has never failed me and I will never forget him. I no longer fear because I know his hand will be outstretched to meet mine whatever happens. Hundreds of thousands of other American Catholic women have said the same thing about Jude, claiming him as their intimate confidant, friend, and protector. At some point in their experience of hopelessness, the devout write to the Shrine in Chicago to describe what is happening or what has happened to them. These narratives, which have been published in the Shrine's devotional periodi 1. Mrs. C. E. N., Bay City, Michigan, The Voice of Saint Jude, (May, 1955), I. 34. 67 This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:17:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 U.S. Catholic Historian cal, The Voice of Saint Jude, since 1934, are a particularly important feature of this devotion. Jude is called the "forgotten Saint." His devout say that he was lost to history because he was confused with Judas, and they promise to make Jude's intervention in their lives public so that others will learn about him. This means that when a woman tells a female relative or friend of hers who is in distress about Saint Jude, which is mainly how the devotion grew during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, she explicitly offers her friend the possibility of eventually recreating her terrible experience in a public narrative. There are two interrelated forms of narrative practice in this devotion. The initial exchange between the two female friends is an exchange of stories, which typically proceeds in this manner: one woman confides her anxieties and fears about her husband's alcoholism to another woman. This second woman takes Jude's picture out of her purse and hands it over to her friend. As she does so, she tells the first woman all about the time Saint Jude helped her in a similar moment of need. The letters of crisis and gratitude that women write to the Shrine con stitute the devotion's second form narrative practice. Narration is as central to this devotion as are the specific requests women make to the Saint: in the form of shared stories of female crisis, the narrations are an expression of Catholic wom en's culture; as inscribed stories in the devotional periodical, the texts constitute a genre of popular religious literature, in particular of women's religious writing.2 Women so substantially outnumber men in the practice of this devotion that it must be considered a women's devotion, although we should immediately remind ourselves how ambiguous and uncertain this designation is, and how inflected by ideology. Women have always been the main participants in the Roman Catholic cult of the saints (even though male saints significantly outnumber female holy figures in the tradition).3 From this perspective, the qualification of a popular devotion as a "women's devotion" is redundant. Admitting the problematic nature of the phrase, a case for so identifying the devotion to Jude can be made as follows. In addition to their numerical superi ority, Jude's female devout assumed special roles and met particular responsibil ities in relation to the supernatural world. Women always approached the Saint, even when the request was being made on behalf of a man; they established the 2. Writing to the sacred is an ancient form of communication between human beings and the supernatural. Devout Jews press their petitions, written on little slips of paper, into the crevices of the Wailing Wall. Ancient Roman Christians carved pleas for better health into the walls of the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. The tradition of constructing privileged narratives of the personal encounter with particular sacred beings in moments of dire need is also ancient. Such narratives can take many forms, oral, written, or visual (as in the ex-voto traditions of Catholic Europe). The storytelling process engaged in by Jude's devout must also be seen against what one historian has argued is the decline of 44self-storytelling" in the United States as a result, in part, of the mass-production of fantasies in popular literature and film. The advent of the devotion to Saint Jude in the United States in fact coincided with the rise of pulp romances, which were aimed in particular at workingclass women; it is possible, then, that the devotion allowed American Catholic women to resist, at least for some time and in this way, the loss of this story-telling voice. See Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, (Chapel Hill and London, 1984), pp. 49-50. 3. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has said, "from the mid-seventeenth century onward, the majority of church members, revival converts, and church volunteer workers have been women." "The New Woman and the New History," Feminist Studies, Volume 3, No. 1/2, Fall, 1975, 185-198. See also Stephen Wilson, "Introduction," p. 37, in Wilson, (ed.), Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, (Cambridge, 1983). This content downloaded from 66.31.143.47 on Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:17:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions What Did Women Think They Were Doing When They Prayed to Saint Jude? 69 binding relationship with Jude that, beginning at the moment of his intervention in their lives, would continue for years afterwards and be the grounds for future requests. Women negotiated with the sacred on behalf of their men.4 They were always the ones to express their families' gratitude for Jude's action. When men occasionally write to the Shrine, they invariably identify Jude with a significant woman in their lives, calling him "my mother's saint," for example.5 Widowers write to the Shrine to remember their wives' devotion.6 It is almost always a woman who introduces men to Jude. As one man told me, My mother gave me the material about Saint Jude. She had quite a strong devotion to him, and I picked up some literature at her house on Ashland Avenue [in Chicago]. That's where I lived, on Ashland Avenue. My mother lived on Ashland Avenue for forty-five years. She called on Saint Jude whenever she had a problem, and I have followed in her footsteps.7 This man's incantatory repetition of "Ashland Avenue," the place where his mother lived, and his association of this place with Saint Jude, point to the deep connection the devout see between Jude and women. Indeed, this association is so strong that in their letters to the Shrine, women suggest that Jude acts for them, that without their intervention on behalf of some family member, Jude would not have responded to prayers. Consider the pro gression of personal prounouns in this statement, made to the Shrine in 1958, by a woman writing from Miamisburg, Ohio: We needed money and my husband was out of work. Saint Jude showed me the way to obtain the money we required. I want my gratitude made public. Her husband was out of work, and they were both struggling, but Jude showed her the way to get the necessary money.

Load more