Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

by Robert A. Orsi

St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes, is the most popular saint of the American Catholic laity, particularly among women. This fascinating book describes how the cult of St. Jude originated in 1929, traces the rise in Jude's popularity over the next decades, and investigates the circumstances that led so many Catholic women to feel hopeless and to turn to St. Jude for help.

Robert A. Orsi tells us that the women who were drawn to St. Jude―daughters and granddaughters of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Ireland―were the first generations of Catholic women to make lives for themselves outside of their ethnic enclaves. Orsi explores the ambitions and dilemmas of these women as they dealt with the pressures of the Depression and the Second World War, made modern marriages for themselves, entered the workplace, took care of relatives in their old neighborhoods, and raised children in circumstances very different from those of their mothers and grandmothers. Drawing on testimonies written in the periodicals devoted to St. Jude and on interviews with women who felt their lives were changed by St. Jude's intervention, Orsi shows how devotion to St. Jude enabled these women to negotiate their way amid the conflicting expectations of their two cultures―American and Catholic.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Womens, Christianity

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another terrific historical, ethnographic work from Orsi. As usual, he doesn’t just blandly describe what people said to and about St. Jude in his field data and in the archives he used, but he sets a theoretical framework for basically every piece he analyzes. For the portions of the book pertaining to the medical placement of Jude, he makes clear which medical anthropologists he is standing on, but insofar as I know, his use of them is innovative for the field of religious studies. He then theorizes illness (what is it? how does it constitute the self? what are its social and imaginative limits? etc) amidst the changing environment of the increasingly male and hierarchical medical world in the mid-twentieth century, into which women brought Jude. The economic and geographic movement of Catholic women from the Depression through the 1960s also forms a backdrop for this social history, as the continued expectations that women would hold together the family unit and participate in longstanding family traditions of female responsibility over kin (as was the case in the ethnic enclaves of the late 19th century cities) pressed on them as they moved towards the modern workplace and often away from the enclaves.

The brilliance of the work is in the way that Orsi carves out space between the dichotomies that the tools of secular academic analysis implicitly set up. Through structural analysis we might evaluate whether or not these women were either being submissive or liberated through their devotion to Jude. Whether the devotion was private or public. Active/passive, moral/amoral, adult/infantile, or whether this was magic or religion. The inadequacy of those dichotomies should immediately be apparent, in general, but in particular they do not capture the in-betweenness of the lived experience of the women devoted to Jude, or of the saint’s in-betweenness for that matter. Jude goes with the women into zones of devotional culture and work and home where they submit in the way that both Catholic and broader American cultural norms instructed them to, but he also provided a springboard for their agency, for their own action and courageous negotiation of the boundaries of their social worlds. Through Jude, mediation between the injunction to submit and suffer (even amidst drunk, abusive husbands, which in Catholic devotional culture were seen as merely opportunity to grow in holiness for the silently suffering wife) and the possibility of real change in crisis became possible. Jude existed (exists) in relationship with women (and men). He represented the culture that Catholic women inherited in the mid-twentieth century, but in relationship with him these women altered the culture that they received to make it more hospital for them. He was apart of the world that they made and sustained together, with their shared histories of intense Catholic devotional culture and multi-sided injunctions to submission and suffering in tow,
among other things. There is great directional ambiguity in devotion to Jude if you are looking for analysis of the social “progress” that women made in this period through Jude. It would certainly be difficult and malicious to dismiss the devotional cult (technical term) of St. Jude as merely childish or regressive (even if sometimes it could be described as such). Jude also helped Catholic women move from the enclave into the modern world, negotiating the expectations incumbent upon them in both. A pleasure to read.

[Brandon Scott Butcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orsi’s central argument is impressive in its scope. It perfectly expresses the complexity of the relationship between St Jude and the 2nd/3rd generation immigrant Catholic women who both prayed to him and spread his name. Women, through Jude, reclaimed agency in their lives. Still, the catharsis praying to him created kept women in abusive roles and family structures. The nuanced manner in which Orsi explores his subjects is reminiscent of Caroline Bynum and Mary Douglas before him. He refuses to settler for simple answers, instead preferring the messiness of truly engaging a subject.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ethnographic look at South Chicago immigrant daughters in the 1930s-1960s is a participant-observer view of devotion of St. Jude. Orsi takes time to explore the history, the literature, the experiences, and the context. He raises questions about devotional kitsch as well as gendered experiences, theodicy, socioeconomic impacts.

[Isaac Kofsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book wraps theology, history, psychology, and women's/gender studies all into one. Some chapters can drag on but I would recommend this book.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

dense but interesting. read for gender and power in the catholic church

[Megan Uy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty dense academic book (seems to have grown out of the author's doctoral dissertation). Parts were extremely dry (the establishment of the National Shrine of St. Jude) while other parts (dovetailing the changing status and expectations of women within and without the Catholic Church with the devout's reliance on prayer to the saint to cope with the challenges these tensions brought to their lives) were fascinating. Overall, I found the author's tone engaging: he demonstrated a true fondness for his subjects as well as a sense of outrage on their behalf as he laid out the many ways in which the culture, secular and Catholic, failed them over the course of their lives. Also, as an apparent non-believer, he demonstrated both bemusement at and profound respect for the women's devotion to St. Jude, their faith, and their commitment to loved ones and their community, which I appreciated.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is fascinating, a look at how devotees of the cult of Saint Jude (mainly female devotees) used their devotion to the saint to navigate changes in American society from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War. A really good argument that in some cases, a larger social or cultural history that seems secular may actually have strong religious undercurrents guiding and affecting it. Orsi does a great job with a huge amount of primary source info: he appears to have analyzed about fifty years of letters written to the magazine published by the Shrine of Saint Jude. A lot of work, and it led to some really interesting insights.

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

God this was boring.

[Franki]

My Mother's Saint!