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
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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.
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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).
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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. She further reserves the Saint to herself by emphasizing that it is, in her words, "my [not our] gratitude" she is expressing. When doctors told another woman that her husband's recovery from a stroke was "miraculous," she secretly thought, "I knew: I had prayed to Saint Jude most of the night." "I prayed to Saint Jude to help my husband who is very sick with jaw cancer," a woman wrote from Cleveland in 1964. "The doctors think that with an operation they can save his life. I want to give thanks to Saint Jude for helping me.
4. For example, "My husband and I have been faithful devotees to the Blessed Saint for the past two years and I promised to donate the first dollar raise my husband received to the Shrine, so I am keeping my promise as my prayers were answered." Mrs. B. H., Voice, (February, 1937):16. 5. M. E. G., South Coventry, Connecticut, Voice, (September, 1955):34. 6. Mr. F. R., Depew, New York, Voice, (April, 1953):33. 7. Interview with Frank K., 66 years old, Los Angeles, California, 12/1/1987. 8. Mrs. H. G., Miamisburg, Ohio, Voice, July, 1958, letters page [unpaginated]; Mrs. C. A. B., Brookline, Massachusetts, Voice, (October, 1958) letters page [unpaginated]; St. Jude's Journal, (April-May, 1964):2. [In 1960, the devotional features of The Voice of Saint Jude were separated from that periodical (which had been evolving towards a more general family magazine since before the war, and was now renamed U.S. Catholic) and made the central feature of a new, smaller, more restricted publication, addressed only to Jude's devout.] One of the consequences of this belief in the peculiar efficacy of women's devotions is that women are impelled to ever more intense prayer, as if the fervor of their entreaties is the guarantor of their success. The women themselves call attention to this quality of their prayers, as though they are
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These women developed private and intimate personal relationships with Jude. They kept (and many still keep) his picture in their purses and his statue in their bedrooms. "It makes me feel he is right there with me," one woman told me. Another wrote that she thinks of Jude as "a gentle kind loving person, who you would like to embrace." Older women look back on their lives and say, "Saint Jude was always near to me." A woman who keeps an image of Jude in every room of her house explained that she does this, "so when I want to talk to Saint Jude he is right there looking at me." Another woman says she always keeps an image of Jude in her purse so she can always "hold on tight to it."9 A close and rewarding friendship clearly existed between this male saint and his female de vout. What is an historian to make of this?
2. The Problem
Although it is presided over to some greater or lesser extent by male religious authorities, Catholic devotionalism is a woman's world. This is an historical com monplace, but almost nothing has been made of it: Typically, historians will de scribe this predominance of women in popular devotions, but then, when it comes time to interpret the significance of these practices, they generalize and discuss them as inclusive human practices. This is not accurate, though: whatever else it is, modern Catholic devotionalism is fundamentally the religious experience and expression of women.10 As a result, a number of important questions concerning the implications and consequences of devotionalism as women's world, which have been examined by feminist histo rians of other historical practices, have gone unasked. For example, is a woman's participation in a particular popular devotion an exercise of personal power or an admission of powerlessness? Is it a sign of a passive acceptance of fate, or a gesture of self-determination? Is the world of popular devotions a case of woman's sphere (those activities deemed appropriate for women by male culture) or wom en's culture (an autonomous, self-authorized space of relative freedom from male contraints)? The problems of reading a women's devotion are compounded by a more gen
reminding the Saint that they are doing their share. One woman described herself as praying "until my throat ached" for a cure for her sister-in-law's cancer. A. R. S., Chicago, Illinois, Voice, (September, 1958), letters page [unpaginated]. Women undertook grueling prayer marathons?fifty-four day nove nas, for example?on behalf of their families. 9. In January, 1988,1 attended a novena to Saint Jude, and invited people to discuss their devotions to Saint Jude with me. I offered potential sources a number of different formats. I gave them my university address so that they could write to me (and I received twenty-five letters, all but two from women, and most of them quite long). I distributed a brief questionnaire that was designed mainly as a conversation document: my hope was that women would stop by and talk with me about the questions I raised. Sixty women returned these documents, along with five men. Finally, I interviewed fifteen devout in an office generously provided me by the Shrine clergy. These sources are intended to supplement the printed sources available at the Shrine. The quotations cited here are from the questionnaires, and were in response to the questions: "How would you describe Saint Jude? What do you think he looks like?" and "Do you have a statue of Saint Jude at home? Where do you keep it?" When I cite any of these documents in the rest of this paper, I will identify the source by initials (which I have made up), sex, age, and residence. 10. A useful sketch of the history of devotionalism in modern American Catholic history can be found in Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, New York, 1985).
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This statue of St. Jude the Apostle, patron of hopeless causes, stands above the altar at the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago.
(Courtesy: National Shrine of St. Jude.)
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eral dilemma which attends any effort to do the social history of a religious practice. Because the words we use to name religious phenomena are so familiar, we are deceived into assuming we know what we are referring to when we use them. But do we really know what is going on when a woman prays to Saint Jude? How do we interpret women at prayer in the broader settings of culture or wom en's history? Prayer, in the culture I am considering here, was a highly privileged form of speaking?but what is prayer to an historian? Is it a private activity that exists in some special space outside of society and culture? Or is it the most intimate way that the norms and values of particular orderings of the social world are internal ized? When a woman prays to a male sacred figure for herself or for her family, what are her connections with the institutions, structures, and arrangements of power in her society? When she prays that her husband finds work during the Depression, what is her relationship to social structure and the ideologies of work? And when she prays to be able to have children during the 1950s, how does prayer mediate her relationship with her own body? What is a woman doing in and to her world, and to herself, when she prays? Historians who have worked on this dimension of American Catholic culture have tended to see women's participation in the cult of the saints as evidence of passivity or submissiveness. The devotions are seen as emotional compensation and solace in a difficult world. This is not how the devout themselves see the devotions, however, and in this essay I want to propose an experiment. It is a rule of hermeneutics that cultural analysis must begin with the perceptions and cate gories of participants themselves; analysis does not stop here, but it certainly begins with this. So the question becomes: how did women understand their own participation in the devotion to Saint Jude?
3. Gender and Founding of the Devotion
The devotion was founded in Chicago in 1929, by Father James Tort, a Cata lonian priest of the Claretian Order. The Claretians had been invited to Chicago in 1924 by Cardinal George Mundelein to work among the Mexican migrants labor ing on the railroads and in the steelmills of the city. Tort arrived the following year. An astute businessman and politician, Tort set about the task of building a church for Chicago's Mexican community. Our Lady of Guadalupe, on 91st Street and Brandon Avenue, was dedicated in 1928.n No mention is made of Jude in any of the earliest records and accounts of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Tort first encountered the Saint by chance (as many of the devout do) in a Claretian mission in Prescott, Arizona, where he was stationed in 1923. Jude was known to the Claretians; there was a small shrine in one of their churches in Chile, where Jude was protector of prostitutes. The Spanish language prayer card Tori discovered in the back of the Arizona mission reflects this earlier
11. Sources for the early history of the devotion include: Dedication of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, September 30th, 1928, published in Chicago by John L. Hannigan; Rev. Victor Julian, CMF, "Necrology: Father James Tort," 1955, a mimeographed biography of the founder of the Shrine, prepared at his death for the Claretian Order; James Tort, CMF, "Dedication Anniversary of the National Shrine of Saint Jude," Voice of Saint Jude (February, 1935): 12-13; George Hull, "Life Begins at Forty" Voice, (June, 1935):7-10.
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Hispanic devotion to the Saint, about which very little is known.12 Tort developed a personal devotion to Jude, as the story is told at the Shrine, and when Our Lady of Guadalupe was completed, he commissioned a special statue of the Saint mod elled on a Spanish statue he owned. He installed this statue and one of Saint Therese of Lisieux in the church in 1929. As yet there was still no American devotion to Saint Jude (and none in the local Mexican community as well.) At this point, legend and history come together, as they always do in stories about the beginnings of shrines. Such legends are useful to historians, of course, both for the information that can be derived from them and from the larger meanings and indications of the stories. In this particular case, the legend has a subtext about gender. The two statues were placed on the right side of the church: Saint Therese in the more prominent position over the side altar, and Saint Jude on a little pedestal to her left. Therese's prominence is understandable; she was at the time a much better known holy figure, and had a cultic center already in Chicago. More greatly contrasting sacred figures could not have been found. Historians and theologians have recently begun rethinking the meanings of the Little Flower, and their work has revealed important and long-misunderstood aspects of her life: her fierce independence, moral courage, and strength, and her willingness to stand up to male religious authority in her effort to find her own spiritual path. This is an important revision, but his is not the figure of the popular Catholic imagination of the 1920s and 1930s. The Little Flower was the most girlish of all saints, a child saint, celebrated for her submissiveness. Jude, on the other hand, as he is represented by the statue prepared especially for the Chicago Shrine (which has since become the standard representation of Jude in the United States) is a large, strong, bearded male. One of the devout described him to me as "tall, handsome, with a cleft in his chin and has soft sympathetic eyes and a gentle smile."13 Almost nothing is known about the Saint himself, apart from the fact that he was one of the Apostles and may have had some kind of kinship relationship with Jesus?the Shrine refers to him as Jesus' cousin. This family tie, which is thought to be one of the sources of Jude's special power, resulted in an iconographical tradition that emphasized the saint's physical resemblance to Jesus. This further deepens Jude's masculine identity. Catholic
12. This Hispanic devotion to Saint Jude also had little impact on his American cult. Mexican men and women who lived in the neighborhood addressed their prayers to Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe. Later in the history of the church and community, a plaque of Our Lady of San Juan was placed in the rear of the church for newly arriving Puerto Rican migrants. Mexicans at the Shrine refer to the cult of Saint Jude as the "Anglos' devotion," by which they mean the devotion of Irish American, Italian American, and Americans of Eastern European descent. And in turn these "Anglos" refer to the church not as "Our Lady of Guadalupe," but as "Saint Jude's." 13. Reponse to question, "How would you describe Saint Jude? What do you think he looks like?" Respondent: AF-F-50-Chicago. Other responses included: "quiet, soft-spoken, sure of himself," LM F-55-Chicago; "a very loving big brother or father," PO-F-75-Chicago; "He is a gentle, kind loving person, who you would like to embrace," HJ-F-76-Chicago; "I picture Saint Jude as a man to be of 5 feet and between 9 to 11 inches in height with a good and average build. He gives the appearance of a very kindly, understanding and caring person with a Big Heart. He looks to be a very humble and courageous man, with a very Fatherly disposition, and compassion for all mankind particularly those who are desparate for his help. His very close resemblance to his Cousin Jesus is simply outstanding and beautiful." PS-F-68-Indiana; "I think he has penetrating eyes. A gentle smile, a look of Protection. Some One to Lean On." GR-F-66-Indiana.
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theology taught that priests had a special closeness with Jesus, so that a number = = of identifications were operative at the Shrine: Jude Jesus; Jesus priests; = Jude priests. (One of my sources commented that when she prays to Jude, she imagines him standing beside her "in Mass vestments."14) The people who visited the church then in its first years had a choice of sacred figures. In the account preserved at the Shrine, most of these "people," who were in fact mostly women, began gathering in ever greater numbers at Jude's statue. So great was this popular preference that during Holy Week, 1929, the two statues were reversed. Jude now occupied the more prestigious place above the main alter, and Therese the more inconspicuous pedestal. With this, the devotion to Jude begins. Begins, that is, in the displacement of a female religious figure (a girl, really) with an especially masculine one; a displacement, furthermore, that was the choice of the women from the ethnically-mixed Catholic neighborhood around Our Lady of Guadalupe. These women imagined Jude into existence then; or perhaps, more accurately and historiographically useful, Jude came into existence through a complex dynamic involving clerical choice, social circumstances, reli gious tradition, and female appropriation, desire, and need. What then did women want from this man whom they had imagined into being?
4. What Women Thought They Were Doing When They Prayed to Saint Jude
Women asked Jude for many different favors, and these requests changed over time as the circumstances of American Catholic women changed.15 These many requests can be grouped into four general areas of experience and action for analysis. First, women understood themselves to be exerting through Jude a determining influence on the lives of their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, and fiances. Women whose sons or husbands hated their work, or worked in dangerous oc cupations, or had pulled bad hours, got their men new jobs by praying to Jude. A woman described how this happened in a letter from San Gabriel, California, in May, 1950:
Iwant to thank Saint Jude for a favor received. I asked that my husband get a job he liked. A short time ago, he got just such a job, that of a mechanic. I had been making novenas to Saint Jude for this favor for some time, and am so grateful that he heard my prayers.16
Women claim credit for having rescued their husbands from alcoholism. One
14. Personal letter, F-89-LaCrosse, Wisconsin. 15. Changes in the requests women made to Jude suggest alternative ways of periodizing American history or of reconceptualizing the standard periodization. The years 1945-1960, for example, are characterized in the letters as a time of great anxiety over reproduction. Women worried that they would not be able to have children. If their friends had children before they did, their dread deepened. Women were also frightened by the physical strain of their many pregnancies. They were concerned that they would not be able to support the children they were bearing. On this subject of periodization, see Joan Kelly-Gadol, "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History," Signs, I(1976):810-12. 16. L. L., San Gabriel, California, Voice (May, 1950): 11.
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PRAYER TO ST. JUDE a To be said rvhen problems arise or when one seems to be deprived of all visible help, or for cases almost despaired of. Most holy apostle, St. Jude, faithful ser vant and friend of Jesus, the name of the traitor who delivered your beloved Master into the hands of His enemies has caused you to be forgotten by many, but the Church honors and invokes you universally, as the patron of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. Pray for me, I am so helpless and alone. Make use 1 implore you, of that particular privilege given to you, to bring visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in this great need that I may receive the consolation and help of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations, and sufferings, par ticularly? (Here make your request) and that I may praise God with you and all the elect forever. I promise, O blessed St. Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor, to always honor you as my special and power ful patron, and to gratefully encourage de votion to you. Amen. (To encourage devotion to St. Jude, distribute these Pictures or acknowledge in writing favors received.)
Cforoflon Fofhors 221 Wost Madison St. Chicago, III. 60606
RA-614E V.A MAOCIN U.S.A.
This popular prayer card includes the well-known petition to St. Jude.
(Courtesy: National Shrine of St. Jude.)
woman summarized the process in a brief note to the Shrine in 1958, "My hus band was an alcoholic and thanks to Saint Jude, to whom Imade a no vena, he said he would turn over a new leaf."17 The men involved frequently do not know why it is that their lives are changing. Soldiers will suddenly have their assignments revised so they are stationed closer to home; a factory worker, whose hours had been inconveniencing his new wife, is rescheduled one day to another shift after he had been requesting this unsuc cessfully for years; a soldier suddenly finds himself on leave before heading out to Korea, despite his commander's previous refusals to grant this. In all these cases, the men involved found events inexplicable, while their wives or women friends were writing to the Shrine reporting the success of their prayers.18 One woman's husband had been discouraged by his year-long failure to find work. When things at home became desperate, his wife turned to Jude. Suddenly, an interview with a likely employer is arranged, but the man is so weary and so frightened by his long unemployment that his wife is afraid that he will fail the test.
17. Mrs. J. G., Ridge wood, New Jersey, Voice (May, 1938) letters page [unpaginated]. 18. K. K. E., Bronx, New York; M. C, Plaistow, New Hampshire; and A. McD., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, all in Voice (November, 1951):32.
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So on the night before the interview, as this woman tells the story, "I tucked the medal of Saint Jude in my husband's pocket, knowing he would help. I wasn't very much surprised when I learned that my husband made the grade."19 Women are taking control of their men's lives in these stories, sometimes secretly, at other times with the men's knowledge. Although this was not a public reversal of roles, in the forum of the letters, which thousands of other women read, in their exchanges with each other, and in their own understandings, the women involved considered themselves to have accomplished these things. In the second category of experience, women resisted the authority that par ticular classes of men had over them, especially medical doctors, with the assis tance of Saint Jude. The years of the develoment of the devotion to Saint Jude coincided with the years of American medicine's greatest public authority and prestige, when more women than ever before were bringing their problems to male medical practitioners. In the medical politics of the time, the only recourse a woman had against the judgment of an individual physician was another doctor's opinion, which under strict codes of professional propriety could not be commu nicated to her.20 It was difficult for women to extricate themselves from this circle of medical authority. Jude provided an alternative authority, and in partnership with him women were often able to take their medical matters into their own hands. Jude did not simply replace the authority of physicians, nor did the devotion express a com plete rejection of modern American medicine. Instead, the Saint's authorization of some medical choices and the devouts' exercise of the various healing practices associated with this shrine (and others) represented a subtle realignment of au thority and power in the experience of sickness: working within the constraints of medical practice, women resisted (sometimes only temporarily, and often par tially) the medical decisions their doctors were urging on them. They asserted their own wishes, and found in their partnership with Jude the strength to insist on them. On another level, sickness was recast as a sacred drama, and in this re imagining, physicians were understood to heal only with power that came from Jude through the prayers of his female devout. One woman used her devotion to Saint Jude to authorize her refusal of her physician's insistence that she have a Caesarean section?the delay that she se cured was enough for her to begin the vaginal birth her doctor had declared impossible.21 Another woman insisted, against her doctor's warnings, that she be allowed to have her child at home.22 In these years, the "symptom pyramid," in Edward Shorter's phrase, had widened, and people, particularly women, felt themselves under more of a com
19. B. M., Cleveland, Ohio (Voice, September, 1950):6. 20. My understanding of this period of American medical history relies on Edward Shorter, Bedside Manners: The Troubled History of Doctors and Patients, (New York: 1985), and Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, New York: 1982). 21. C. M., Alice, Texas, Voice, May, 1949, p. 4. 22. Mrs. P. K., Louisville, Kentucky, Voice, May, 1953, p. 33. This woman concludes her account: "At home I prayed to Saint Jude and Our Blessed Mother and a few days later at 1 a.m. I awoke with a terrible pain but I thought itwas false so I just laid and prayed for if I was going to die I wanted to be with my family. A few hours later my baby was born with no doctor or anyone but my husband around, a big twelve and a half pound boy as healthy as anyone would want and I got along fine. I was up and doing my work in seven days. I will never forget what Saint Jude has done for me."
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pulsion to take themselves to doctors for their complaints. Jude allowed his de vout to step back from this, healing themselves or each other rather than going to the doctor. When they, or members of their families, do go to the doctors, these women are able to reject not only the doctor's authority, but also his prognosis; in case after case reported to the Shrine, women?always women?simply refuse to believe their doctors' statements that there is no hope left for them or their kin. Instead, it is at this point that these women take matters into their own hands. The third category of women's action may be put in these terms: Through Jude women extended their control into those areas for which they were held respon sible by society?the continued welfare of their adolescent sons and daughters, for example?but over which they had little control in fact. In other words, when women were pushed to the edges of their powers as figures in socially-defined family roles, and were about to fail, they turned to Jude, and understood him to be extending that power. One woman ended an affair her older son was having with a married woman; another got her son to go back to college; another reconciled her son and his estranged wife.23 Mothers secure suitable spouses for their children.24 Fre quently, these women first encounter Jude in a place and at a time when their abilities to function in socially mandated ways is sharply and publicly challenged. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, this sort of tension frequently erupted as women returning to the workforce were unable to find satisfactory childcare. "Almost a year ago," a correspondent reported in 1949:
Iwas confronted with the problem of finding a suitable boarding home for my daughter?a place where she would be given good care while I worked. This may not sound like a difficult problem to you, but itmay surprise you to learn of the number of women who will gladly take a woman's hard-earned money and then mistreat her child.
The story has a happy ending; this woman was able to find good day care for her daughter after praying to Saint Jude.25 In these ways, Jude stands at the most fragile moments of modern American Catholic women's experience, when, to put the matter simply, the values of their culture and the exigencies of social realities and economics exerted contradictory but equally compelling pressures. Women were invariably standing at the points of greatest cultural tension, and Jude was standing there with them. Devotion to this Saint was thus an integral aspect of this transitional period in American Cath olic women's history. Finally, Jude's female devout also healed?themselves, their families, their neighbors, and even needy strangers whom they happened to meet. There is ample evidence in the texts that Jude's devout understood well the orthodox teachings concerning the cult of the saints; there is also ample evidence, never theless, that they believed that they themselves healed, with power borrowed from the Saint, in a kind of partnership between heaven and earth. "I feel so happy and grateful," a woman wrote the Shrine in 1952, "that
23. E. G., Ipswich, Massachusetts, Voice (Apirl, 1949):7; A. F., Chicago, Illinois, Voice (May, 1952):32; A. S., Wyoming, Ohio, Voice (March, 1950):6. 24. Mrs. W. M., New Roads, Louisiana, Voice (August, 1936): 13. 25. M. C, Providence, Rhode Island, Voice (June, 1949):4.
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through my prayers a child walks again."26 "My little girl was very sick," another woman reports, "but my prayers to Saint Jude improved her greatly and I know if I keep praying she will soon completely recover."27 Neighborhood women who were known to have a special friendship with the Saint were often asked by friends and acquaintances to come and pray over a sick person for them. In their healing work, the devout made use of the array of ritual objects? medals, pictures, relics?that the Shrine, until the 1960s, not only made available to the devout, but actually encouraged them to acquire. The most popular of these items was blessed olive oil, mailed out to the devout around the country in small, black, octagonally-shaped vials. A woman whose child was suffering from high . . fevers reported that she "rubbed her back with the Oil. and she is well on the road to recovery."28 A woman whose husband was overseas in the military healed their daughter of a chest problem by using the oil.29 Women healers prescribe the oil for relatives and friends, giving them careful instructions in its use; then they monitor the progress of the person's condition. If there is a healing, they report this to the Shrine, noting their place in it and frequently mentioning the gratitude expressed by the person healed and his or her family?to them.30
5. Conclusions
We are in a better position now to consider whether or not devotion to Saint Jude constituted an oppositional practice, and a way for women to take control over their lives and choices. Jude's devout themselves clearly believed that this was the case. Historians may ultimately want to conclude, given other evidence concerning the devotion and its place in a larger social and cultural context, that these practices were anything but subversive; but our consideration of this issue will have to acknowledge that the women involved certainly saw themselves acting effectively in the world by praying to Jude. If there was submission, it was through the detour of opposition, and what solace women found in the devotion was in part the solace of having accomplished something important. This way of thinking about the devotions opens some new interpretive possi bilities on the liturgical reforms of the mid-1960s. Devotionalism reached its peak in the 1950s, just prior to the Second Vatican Council; there is little evidence, in other words, to support the notion that conciliar reforms were addressed to a dessicated or moribund community. Whatever an individual scholar's commit ments and attitudes may be regarding this period of American Catholic history,31
26. S. A., Hatboro, Pennsylvania, Voice (May, 1952):32. 27. Mrs. P. B., Crestline, Ohio, Voice (October, 1958) letters page [no pagination]. 28. Mrs. L. H. M., Fort Madison, Iowa, Voice (December, 1940): 17. 29. J. H., Washington, D.C. Voice (April, 1949):6. 30. M. Mc, St. Cloud, Minnesota, Voice (November, 1950):5. 31. Has American Catholicism reached a point where an historian can study devotionalism histor ically and anthropologically without assumptions being made about his or her own religious commit ments? Apparently not. A prominent liturgist of the 1960s walked out of a dinner party I was at recently when the talk got around to my current research. He was furious with me, believing that I was trying to revive the devotional excesses he had fought so hard to excise from Catholic spirituality. And, from the other side, I was attacked recently at an east coast Catholic university by someone in the audience (who was not a member of that University's community) for, as he put it, "ridiculing and mocking the faith of my mother, grandmother, and aunts." The American Catholic historical com munity may eventually have to examine this issue directly.
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it is a misreading to cast these two moments (just prior to the Council, just after the Council) in radically opposite terms, as contrasting moments of light and darkness. One of the major historiographical tasks of contemporary American Catholic history is to reconceptualize this story, in particular to rethink the pos sibility of continuities across this assumed divide, and to reconsider the inner history of the American Church in the years prior to this "break." The intensity of women's participations in devotional practices, as indicated by the letters to the Shrine of Saint Jude, also reached its height in these years. This raises the question of whether or not there was an implicit, perhaps unconscious, gender bias to the reforms. Colleen McDannell has traced the efforts of the litur gical reformers to displace the mother as spiritual head of the family by a cam paign on behalf of lay male religious authority.32 As American church reformers in the 1960s set out to expunge devotional practices from popular worship, those practices by which women exercised power (even if this was limited to the world of the supernatural) through their relationships with sacred figures were especially marked out for reform.33 In the wake of the reforms, those features of popular devotionalism most associated with women's power were gone, and the expres sions of devotionalism that remained were (at least initially) a little more securely fastened to clerical authority. In this way, one phase of American Catholic women's history, the first period of popular Catholic culture to follow the years of immigration, came to an end. The devotion to Saint Jude was one of the first major indigenous popular devo tions to develop in the United States in the immediate post-immigration period. The women who participated in this devotion came from all over the United States and from all the different cultures that made up American Catholicism; no one ethnic group predominated in the cult. Unlike the popular devotions of the im migrant period, this devotion was not linked to places or seasons: the prayers could be said anytime, anyplace, and the Shrine clergy regularly told the devout that they need not come to Chicago (although they were always welcome, and the Shrine encouraged families to drop by on their summer vacations) in order to participate in the novenas. In these ways, the devotion to Saint Jude articulated new conceptions of space and time, and offered new forms of piety, more con sonant with the culture of the new world. Still, it was a recognizable Catholic popular devotion; the devotion to Saint Jude was very much a transitional devotion for generations of women still close to the old ways of their European mothers and grandmothers. It offered new, but still familiar, idioms for American-born or raised women to continue exercising the responsibilities, perogatives?and powers?they had seen their mothers and grandmothers exercise. Jude proved to be a worthy companion in this period of change.
32. Colleen McDannell, "A Woman's Place is in the Home: Catholic Domesticity, 1860-1960," [unpublished paper], pp. 37-41. 33. The ways in which liturgical reform and renewal and theological rethinking was conducted at the Shrine of Saint Jude in Chicago is beyond the scope of this essay. The Shrine clergy in the early 1960s was both committed to the theology and liturgical reforms of the council and to the devotion to Saint Jude. They began to reformulate the devotion in these new terms, a complex process that demanded an acknowledgement of the power and integrity of the devotion itself and a clear sense of the limits of change. This interaction between a strong devotion and a cautious and respectful reforming clergy may be the reason why Jude's devotion, unlike many others, did not wane in these years, and actually increased.
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