Prayer to St. Jude for Impossible Causes

This is the prayer most Catholics mean by “the St. Jude prayer”, in the wording EWTN prints. It is also the prayer of the St. Jude novena, said once a day for nine days. The narrated meditation at the top of this page ends with a slightly different, older form of the same prayer.

When there is no time or no strength for the full prayer, one line is enough. The first four below are traditional: EWTN prints them at the close of the St. Jude novena. The Chicago shrine’s own advice is that a prayer to him can be as simple as “St. Jude, pray for us”. The last is the ending of his own letter in the New Testament, which is a prayer of praise in its own right.

“Impossible”, in this devotion, rarely means a miracle against nature. It means a situation that has stopped moving: the diagnosis that is not responding, the court case, the debt, the marriage nobody will name out loud. Scripture’s answer to the word is short. The angel told Mary, “nothing spoken by God is impossible” (Luke 1:37), and Jesus said, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Neither is a promise that the thing will go the way we want. Both are a promise that it is not beyond God.

If the hopelessness is not about a situation but about your own life, if you have begun to think that the people around you would be better off without you, please reach out to someone before you pray, not after:

Illness is one of the needs most often brought to St. Jude. The National Shrine of St. Jude notes that people often turn to him straight after a diagnosis or at the start of treatment, and the children’s hospital in Memphis that bears his name exists because of that devotion. EWTN prints this short traditional prayer for someone who is critically ill:

Work and money have been St. Jude intentions since the beginning of his American devotion: the first Solemn Novena at the Chicago shrine was held in 1929, the year the Great Depression began, in a parish of steelworkers’ families. Jesus never told anyone to stop asking for bread. He taught us to ask, “Give us today our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), and to put first things first: “But seek first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

Some of the hardest cases people bring to St. Jude are inside their own homes: a marriage that has gone silent, a son or daughter who no longer calls, a parent lost to addiction or to bitterness, a family that can no longer sit in one room. His letter asks for exactly the mercy those situations need: “On some have compassion, making a distinction, and some save, snatching them out of the fire with fear” (Jude 22–23).

St. Jude was one of the Twelve Apostles, and the Gospels name him in two ways, which is part of why he is easy to miss. Luke and Acts call him “Judas the son of James” (Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13). Matthew and Mark call him Thaddaeus: “Lebbaeus, who was also called Thaddaeus” (Matthew 10:3), and simply “Thaddaeus” (Mark 3:18). Tradition joined the two names into Jude Thaddeus. Pope Benedict XVI, who gave a general audience to him and St. Simon on October 11, 2006, noted how little about him has come down to us.

He speaks once. At the Last Supper, “Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, what has happened that you are about to reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?’” (John 14:22). The evangelist’s aside, not Iscariot, is the whole later story of his devotion in two words.

The short Letter of Jude, near the end of the New Testament, opens “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James” (Jude 1), and has traditionally been attributed to him. Whether he was also a relative of Jesus is uncertain. Matthew names a Judas among Jesus’ “brothers” (Matthew 13:55), and the Catechism explains that such “brothers of Jesus” are “close relations of Jesus, according to an Old Testament expression” (CCC 500); the Chicago shrine calls him a cousin.

For his life after Pentecost, the traditions of his preaching and martyrdom, and how he became the saint of hard cases, see St. Jude Thaddeus and the patron saint of lost causes.

His feast day is October 28, which he shares with St. Simon the Zealot. The two are named side by side in the lists of the Twelve, and tradition holds that both died as martyrs for the Gospel in Mesopotamia. The St. Jude novena is traditionally prayed in the nine days before the feast, October 19 to 27.

His symbols, as the National Shrine of St. Jude explains them:

• A medallion with the face of Christ, from the legend of the Image of Edessa: King Abgar of Edessa, gravely ill, asked Jesus to heal him, and Jude brought him a cloth bearing the impression of Christ’s face. It is a legend, not Scripture.
• A flame above his head, for Pentecost, when “tongues like fire appeared and were distributed to them, and one sat on each of them” (Acts 2:3).
• A club or an axe, from the traditions of his martyrdom.
• Green robes, the color of hope and renewal.

The shrine also records that his relics rest in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

No, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is the question most people ask. The “St. Jude prayer that never fails” is the version printed in newspaper classifieds: a few lines to the Sacred Heart and to St. Jude, the instruction to say them nine times a day, the promise of an answer by the eighth day, the claim that it has never been known to fail, and “publication must be promised”. The “three-day miracle prayer” is a cousin of it: say a prayer for three days, promise to publish it, and it will be granted.

The words of the prayer are good. The promise is not the Church’s. Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, writing about exactly this prayer, called the never-fails promise and the publication requirement “pretty questionable”, because they put the power of the prayer in doing it the right number of times; the Catechism calls it superstition “to attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance” (CCC 2111). He was also gentle with the people who place those notices, and so should we be.

If you have been helped, thank God, and tell people if you want to: that is how the old custom of thanking St. Jude in the newspaper began. Just do not believe the help depended on it. The history of the devotion, and of the Chicago shrine that spread it, is on the St. Jude novena page.