The St. Jude Novena

This is the traditional novena prayer to St. Jude, in the wording EWTN prints. The same prayer is said once on each of the nine days, with your intention named at the pause. It is a prayer to St. Jude as an intercessor: it asks him to “intercede with God”, and it is God who is asked for the help.

St. Jude’s feast is October 28, which he shares with St. Simon the Zealot. To finish the novena on the eve of the feast, so that the feast itself is the day of thanksgiving, begin on October 19:

• Day 1: October 19
• Day 2: October 20
• Day 3: October 21
• Day 4: October 22
• Day 5: October 23
• Day 6: October 24
• Day 7: October 25
• Day 8: October 26
• Day 9: October 27, the eve of the feast

The National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago keeps its October Solemn Novena one day later, from October 20 to October 28, so that its ninth day falls on the feast itself. Both are right; the only difference is which day you want to be the last. The shrine keeps five solemn novenas a year, not only in October, and its own guide notes that St. Jude is often invoked straight after a diagnosis or at the start of treatment. You do not have to wait for October. Begin on the day the need arrives.

If you miss a day, the shrine’s advice is simple: make up the missed prayer together with the next day’s, or add a day at the end. Nothing has been broken.

Luke names the Twelve one by one: “When it was day, he called his disciples, and from them he chose twelve, whom he also named apostles”, and among them “Judas the son of James” (Luke 6:13, 16). That is St. Jude: not one of a crowd, but a name. Begin the novena the same way. Name the person or the situation you are bringing, plainly, in the words you would use to a friend, and keep those words for all nine days. Say the novena prayer, then:

Luke’s list ends with the other Judas, “Judas Iscariot, who also became a traitor” (Luke 6:16), and John takes care to write “Judas (not Iscariot)” when St. Jude speaks (John 14:22). For centuries the likeness of the two names kept people from asking his help at all, and he became the forgotten apostle. If you feel mistaken for someone you are not, or simply forgotten, pray today with the promise God makes through Isaiah: “Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15). Say the novena prayer, then:

St. Jude speaks once in the Gospels. At the Last Supper he asks, “Lord, what has happened that you are about to reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answers, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:22–23). He brought a real question and received a real answer. Bring yours today: the why, the how long, the whether. Say the novena prayer, then:

Matthew and Mark call him Thaddaeus (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18). Pope Benedict XVI, teaching about him in 2006, explained that the name may come from an Aramaic word for “breast”, which would suggest “magnanimous”: large-hearted. A desperate situation shrinks the heart around it. Ask today for the opposite: room for the people caught up in this, including the ones who have made it harder. Say the novena prayer, then:

After the Ascension, St. Jude was in the upper room with the other apostles (Acts 1:13), and “all these with one accord continued steadfastly in prayer and supplication, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14). Those days of waiting for the Holy Spirit are where the nine days of a novena come from, and Pentecost is why St. Jude is painted with a flame above his head: “Tongues like fire appeared and were distributed to them, and one sat on each of them” (Acts 2:3). Pray today with Mary, as he did. Say the novena prayer, then:

The short Letter of Jude, which the Church has traditionally attributed to him, gives its readers four things to do while they wait: “But you, beloved, keep building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God’s love, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life” (Jude 20–21). It is a good rule for any long wait: keep the faith you have, keep praying, stay within reach of God’s love, and keep looking for his mercy. Say the novena prayer, then:

The same letter asks for mercy toward those who are struggling: “On some have compassion, making a distinction, and some save, snatching them out of the fire with fear” (Jude 22–23). Many people pray this novena not for themselves but for someone they love: a son or daughter far from home or from God, a friend in the grip of an addiction, a parent who will not accept help. Today, pray for that person by name. If addiction is part of it, the prayer for healing from addiction is written for exactly this. Say the novena prayer, then:

Tradition holds that after Pentecost St. Jude preached with St. Simon in the East and was martyred there, which is why he is shown holding a club or an axe; those details come from tradition, not from Scripture. What Scripture does show is a man who stayed with Christ. St. Paul explains why that kind of faithfulness is never wasted: “hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:5). Ask today for the grace to stay with what you are praying for, however long it takes. Say the novena prayer, then:

The Letter of Jude ends with one of the great doxologies of the New Testament: “Now to him who is able to keep them from stumbling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory in great joy, to God our Savior, who alone is wise, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever. Amen” (Jude 24–25). End the novena as he ended his letter: with praise, before you know how this will turn out. Tomorrow is his feast; if you can, go to Mass and give thanks there. Say the novena prayer, then:

St. Jude was widely honored in the Middle Ages, but, in the words of the National Shrine of St. Jude, perhaps because of the confusion between his name and that of Judas Iscariot, he “slipped into temporary obscurity”. By the early twentieth century he was little known to American Catholics.

That changed in one parish on the southeast side of Chicago. In 1924 Cardinal George Mundelein asked the Claretian Missionaries to take charge of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the city’s first Mexican parish, whose families lived on work in the nearby steel mills. Its pastor, the Claretian Fr. James Tort, had a strong devotion to St. Jude and asked his intercession night after night for the parish’s workers. He began regular devotions, and the first Solemn Novena to St. Jude was held on February 17, 1929. The novena that ended on the feast that year, October 28, 1929, drew such a crowd that more than a thousand people stood outside the church to hear the service. Through the Great Depression and the Second World War thousands came to the shrine’s novenas, and the devotion spread from that corner of Chicago across the country. The Claretians keep the National Shrine of St. Jude there to this day.

Its best-known devotee came later. In 1940 a struggling young entertainer then called Amos Jacobs, soon to be Danny Thomas, heard about St. Jude from a stagehand in Detroit and began to pray to him; the vow he made, as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital records it, was “Show me my way in life, and I will build you a shrine.” The hospital opened in Memphis on February 4, 1962.

For the life of the apostle himself, see St. Jude Thaddeus. For why the Church calls him the patron of desperate cases, see the patron saint of lost causes.

Search for this novena and you will meet another version, usually printed in the classified ads of a newspaper: a few lines to the Sacred Heart and to St. Jude, followed by instructions to say them nine times a day, the promise that by the eighth day the prayer will be answered, the claim that it has never been known to fail, and the line “publication must be promised”. A cousin of it, the “three-day miracle prayer”, asks for three days of prayer and a promise to publish, and says the request will be granted.

The prayers in it are sound. The instructions around them are not. Writing about exactly this prayer in 2012, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence said the devotion to the Sacred Heart and to St. Jude in it is admirable, but that the promise that it never fails and the requirement to publish it are “pretty questionable”, and he pointed to the Catechism: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). He also asked Catholics to be patient with the people who place those notices, who do it in sincerity. That is the right spirit: the fault is in the promise, not in the person.

The custom behind it is older and better. Devotees used to thank St. Jude in the classified section of American newspapers when a petition had been answered, and the traditional novena prayer itself ends with a promise “to gratefully encourage devotion to you”. Gratitude told to others is a good thing. A notice paid for as a condition of being heard is not how prayer works, and nobody who does not publish is heard any less.

What the novena does promise is what every prayer of petition promises. The Chicago shrine’s own guide says plainly that a novena is not transactional: an intention may be granted long after the ninth day, or not at all. The Catechism puts it this way: “Do not be troubled if you do not immediately receive from God what you ask him; for he desires to do something even greater for you, while you cling to him in prayer” (CCC 2737). Nine days do not oblige God. They keep you asking, and they keep you from asking alone.

And if what you are bringing to St. Jude is your own will to keep going, if the situation has brought you to thoughts of ending your life, please do not wait for the ninth day:

The St. Jude Novena is nine days of prayer to the apostle Jude Thaddeus, one of the Twelve, asking his intercession in a situation that looks closed. He is the Church’s patron of desperate and hopeless causes, and that patronage has an unusual origin. His name is the problem. Jude is close enough to Judas that for centuries people avoided invoking him at all, in case the wrong man answered. The tradition that grew from this is a kind of joke with real warmth in it: because he was so rarely asked, he is especially quick to respond. That is not doctrine. It is the sort of thing families say, and it has kept the devotion alive for a very long time. The modern shape of it is American and recent. The National Shrine of St. Jude opened in Chicago in 1929, under the Claretians, and the devotion spread through the Depression among people who had run out of options in a very literal sense. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, founded in 1962 after Danny Thomas made a vow to him, carries the same name for the same reason. What the novena is not is a lever. Nine days of prayer do not oblige God to act, and the honest form of this devotion has always known that. What it offers is nine days of not being alone with the thing, and a saint whose whole reputation is for staying with cases everyone else has written off.

Name the cause specifically on the first day, and use the same words for nine days. Vagueness is the enemy of this novena in particular, because the situations that bring people to it are usually ones they have stopped saying out loud. Pray it at the same time each day if you can. Nine days is short enough that a fixed hour holds, and the repetition is the point: you are not informing God, you are staying with something. Do the ordinary things as well. The Church has never treated a novena as an alternative to seeing the doctor, taking the advice, making the call, or filing the paperwork. Ask, and then act as though the answer might come through your own hands. And if the ninth day comes and nothing has changed, that is not a failed novena. It is the position most of the people who have prayed this one have been in, which is why they kept praying it.