Patron Saint of Lost Causes

The Judas explanation above is the one everyone gives. It is a good explanation. It is also an explanation handed down, not a documented history, and no one can point to when it began.

What can be dated is the revival. Devotion to St. Jude grew again in the nineteenth century in Italy and Spain, spread to Latin America, and reached the United States through the Claretian missionaries, who founded the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago in 1929. From there it became one of the best-known devotions in the country.

St. Rita of Cascia, whose memorial is May 22. She was born at Roccaporena, near Cascia in Umbria, about 1381, and died in the convent at Cascia in 1457; the Catholic Encyclopedia gives 1386 and 1456, and the sources differ. She wanted to be a nun. Her parents married her at about twelve to a man the old accounts call “extremely cruel and ill-tempered”, and she lived with him for eighteen years. He was murdered. Her twin sons swore to avenge him; she begged God to keep them from the crime, and both died, reconciled to God, before they could commit it.

Widowed and alone, she asked to enter the Augustinian convent at Cascia and was refused, because she was a widow. She kept asking, and was admitted, and lived there under the Augustinian Rule until her death. Pope Urban VIII allowed her Mass and Office in 1637, and Pope Leo XIII canonised her on May 24, 1900. In Spain she was already called La Santa de los imposibles, the saint of the impossible, because of the many favours reported at her intercession. She is shown with roses, and often with a wound on her forehead.

Lists online name four, five, or seven, often adding St. Philomena to St. Jude and St. Rita. There is no official list of any length. The Church has never designated a patron of impossible causes by decree; the titles came from what people asked these saints for, and St. Jude and St. Rita are the two with the longest history behind them.

The Church’s own word for this need is hope. The Catechism says hope “keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment” (CCC 1818). Scripture’s model is Abraham, of whom Paul writes: “Against hope, Abraham in hope believed” (Romans 4:18). And the Gospel keeps a prayer for the moment when even hope runs thin, from a father whose son had been ill since childhood: “I believe. Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). That is a prayer anyone can say to God, with St. Jude and St. Rita asking alongside.

Some people come to this page not for a court case or a bill, but because they feel they are the hopeless case: that nothing will change, that the people around them would be better off without them. If that is where you are, the first step is not a novena. It is to tell someone today, and if you are thinking about ending your life, to contact emergency help now.

For the situation everyone else has given up on: a marriage, a diagnosis, a child who will not come home, a debt, an addiction. Name it plainly where the prayer says to. It asks God, and asks the two saints to pray, and promises nothing but trust.

October 28 is the feast of the apostles Simon and Jude in the General Roman Calendar. Many Catholics prepare with the nine-day novena from October 19 to 27, and the Chicago shrine keeps solemn novenas at other times of year too, because people come when the trouble comes, not when the calendar says.

The traditional prayer, “Most holy Apostle, St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus…”, with a prayer for a desperate situation and the famous promise to “publish” it explained rather than repeated, is on the prayer to St. Jude for impossible causes. All nine days of the novena, each with its date, are on the St. Jude novena. No prayer to St. Jude comes with a guarantee, however it is printed; the Catechism calls treating a prayer as if its words worked by themselves superstition (CCC 2111).