A prayer to St. Jude

Two men in the Gospel lists are called Judas. One of them handed Jesus over. The other is the apostle this prayer addresses, and Luke separates the two in a single breath, naming Judas the brother of James before he reaches Judas Iscariot.

English Bibles usually shorten the first name to Jude so the two never blur together. Older translations read Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus, at Matthew 10:3, which is where shrines got the double name, and most modern versions print Thaddaeus alone. John preserves one line from him at the Last Supper, a question about why Jesus would show himself to the disciples while the world saw nothing.

The short letter of Jude near the end of the New Testament carries the name too. Whether the apostle wrote it is genuinely disputed, since the letter introduces its author as the brother of James and never claims to be an apostle. Western churches keep his feast on October 28, shared with the apostle Simon.

The prayer above comes from a booklet the Dominican friars printed in 1929 for the Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus they opened that October at their parish on South Ashland Avenue in Chicago. It gives the blunt explanation, and the prayer repeats it. A confusion of names kept people away, so Jude went centuries with almost nobody asking him for anything. The devotion grew on the idea that a friend of God left unasked for that long would move fast for whoever finally asked.

An older strand goes back to Edessa. Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, tells of a sick king named Abgar who sent word to Jesus, and of a Thaddeus who came after the resurrection and healed him. Eusebius places that Thaddeus among the seventy disciples, a rank below the Twelve, so the identification with the apostle Jude is later tradition built on top of his account.

Chicago got a second St. Jude shrine the same year, and that one carried the devotion across the country. The Claretian priest James Tort founded the National Shrine of St. Jude in 1929 at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a steel mill parish where the mills had already begun cutting their work forces. He opened his first solemn novena on February 17. When a novena ended on the feast day that October, more than a thousand people stood outside because the church was full.

A novena is nine days of the same prayer. The count echoes the days the disciples spent waiting together in Jerusalem between the ascension and Pentecost. No number makes a prayer stronger. What nine days do is give fear a shape to sit inside for a while, which is worth something when the alternative is refreshing your phone at three in the morning.

Say the prayer once a day at whatever hour you can actually keep. When you reach the space the prayer leaves open, name the thing in ordinary words: the biopsy, the eviction date, the hearing, the person who has stopped answering. The Dominican booklet follows the prayer with an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, three times through. Leave those out if they are not yours to say.

If nine days is beyond you tonight, the same booklet prints a line short enough for a hospital corridor: St. Jude, help of the hopeless, aid me in my distress. Repeat it until your breathing slows. Missing a day costs you nothing, and starting the count over is allowed.

If you have ever seen a small newspaper ad reading thanks to St. Jude, publication promised, you have seen the back half of this devotion. The prayer contains a promise: to stay mindful of the favor and to do all in your power to encourage devotion. Printing a notice is how people have kept that promise since shrines began publishing letters of thanks.

The historian Robert Orsi traced the American version of this custom in Thank You, St. Jude, published by Yale University Press. The devotion took hold among Catholic women through the Depression and the war years, and published testimony was how a private answer became a public record.

Photocopied versions later attached much harder terms: say it six times a day, leave nine copies in a church, and add the line about it never having been known to fail. Those instructions travel the way chain letters travel. No shrine charges for a notice. No prayer is voided because you skipped a day, and you owe nothing if you stop.

That phrase pulls people in at the worst hour and can cut them badly on the ninth day. Catholic teaching puts its own limit on it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats it as superstition when a lawful practice gets loaded with a kind of magic, and it says plainly that a prayer does not work by its outward performance while the person praying is somewhere else.

Read the traditional prayer again and notice how little it claims. It asks for visible and speedy help. It leaves the answer with God. A patron is a friend you ask to speak up for you, and that is the whole of it.

You can pray a version that carries the guarantee and still decline to accept the guarantee. That refusal is what protects you on day ten.

Almost every page about this prayer stops before here. The nine days end. The scan is worse. The money did not arrive, the court date stands, the person did not come home. People then decide they prayed wrong or that they were turned down, and both conclusions do real damage to someone already at the end of their strength.

Scripture keeps prayers that were never answered the way the person wanted. Psalm 88 runs all the way to its final line without relief and stays in the book regardless. Jude's own letter ends by handing the reader to the God who is able to keep them from falling, which promises that someone has hold of you. It says nothing about outcomes.

Keep praying and do the next practical thing in the same week. Tell one person who already knows some of it. Ask the hospital about its social worker, the court about a continuance, the utility about a payment plan, the parish office about its emergency fund. If tonight has turned toward hurting yourself, contact a crisis line before anything else on this page.

Catholic and Orthodox Christians treat the saints as alive in Christ and able to pray for people still here, much as you might ask someone at church to pray for you this week. Honor given to a saint is understood as different in kind from the worship owed to God alone.

Most Protestant churches decline the practice. The Reformation confessions direct prayer to God through Christ alone and point to Paul's line that there is one mediator between God and men. A Protestant reader who wants to mark the same day can pray on October 28 for the courage the apostles were given, without addressing Jude directly.

PrayWithJesus.ai is not a Catholic site and holds no approval from any church, so nothing here settles the question of whether you should address Jude at all. The AI on this site is software: it is not a priest, it cannot hear a confession, and it is no substitute for a sacrament or for your own pastor. If this matters to your conscience, take it to a person who can answer for their tradition.