Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotions to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. - book reviews

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 1998 by Mary Jo Neitz

Robert Orsi has written a remarkable book about how American Catholic women were denied their voices, and then found them again within the context of a devotional cult to an obscure saint. This book contributes to our understanding of religious experience as gendered: We see the ways that religious cultures reproduce structures of domination, paths of resistance to domination in the lives of subordinated groups, and the limitations of that resistance. Sources include correspondence published in the publications of the National Shrine to St. Jude between 1935 and the 1980s, seventy sets of written responses to general questions elicited from attendees at novenas to St. Jude at the Shrine in 1987 and 1988, and conversations in Chicago, also in 1987 and 1988, with thirty-five women involved with the Shrine. Orsi links the founding and shaping of the cult with changes in American Catholicism in this century.

The history of Catholic shrines is a history of local practices. St. Jude was one of the twelve apostles, but, perhaps because of an unfortunate conflation of him with Judas Iscariot in the minds of many, devotion to him was not widespread among Catholics before the founding of the shrine in a Mexican parish in South Chicago in 1929. In Santiago, Chile, the Claretian order maintained a shrine to St. Jude, "the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes." Father Jaime Torte had encountered the saint in Arizona, and developed a personal devotion to him. Needing to make money (a seemingly hopeless cause itself at the time), Fr. Torte developed the National Shrine to St. Jude, one whose following was not based primarily on pilgrimages to a local site, but carried out through letters, and in the publications of the Shrine. Orsi argues that this innovation was extremely successful, and that the non-localized spacial location of the devotion in fact coincided with new forms of Catholic piety, a part of which was the creation of a national culture among the Irish and eastern and southern European immigrants after the closing of immigration in 1924.

While this context is important to the success of the shrine, Orsi is particularly interested in the specific content of the cult of St. Jude, and how that content meshed with the life experiences of the women devotees. Orsi located the primary appeal of the cult of St. Jude in its founding period among Catholic women who were the daughters of immigrants. He argues that they experienced in particularly acute ways the tensions between old and new ways. Immigrant men and their sons expected to work, and many of them found work in the steel mills and heavy industry of the cities. The daughters stayed in school longer, and when they went to work, they were more likely to work in the white-collar work force. They became more "American," and experienced tension with the old rules. They wanted freedom from their parents and more latitude to make their own choices including choices about mates. Then as wives they encountered the traditional expectations that their role entailed suffering in silence from the abuses of men. They also suffered from the Catholic Church's expectations of their roles as mothers, especially the restrictions on birth control during the baby boom years. Orsi suggests that authorities - mothers and fathers, husbands, and priests - saw these women as "out of control," while at the same time the women themselves experienced the stress of being caught between worlds.

Orsi argues that the cult's focus on "hopeless causes" gave women a way of giving voice to their own feelings of hopelessness in the face of "ruptured roles" and the gap between what was expected of them and what was possible. He takes issue with those who describe these women's devotions as "slot machine religion." Orsi presents the petitions and bargains that women made as embedded in relationships, both imaginary relationships with St. Jude, and reciprocal relationships with other women. Orsi argues that devotion to Jude permitted women to speak to one another of the dilemmas of their daily lives within the context of a culture which stifled complaints and extolled the virtues of silently suffering women. Although healing was and continues to be a major theme in the petitions of devotees, and is the subject of an interesting chapter, Orsi argues that the first healing had to be of the women themselves.

Orsi's analysis emphasizes the importance of narrative in the transformation of these women's understandings of their troubles. The letters reveal a "narrative of inversion" with women "poised between acknowledging desperation and visions of alternatives, between reality and desire" (p. 132). In the letters, and the women's devotional culture that they reveal to us, "one woman's narrative of grace opened the space to another's narrative of petition" (p. 133). Orsi sees a special relation between Jude, "the inverting saint," with his "in-between location" - powerful but forgotten - and the central features of the devotional practices. Examples of inversion and in-betweenness run throughout the book. Orsi takes us through many layers of understanding to arrive at an appropriately ambivalent interpretation of this multi-vocal symbol and the meaning Catholic women have made of it. While I do not find the evidence entirely convincing for some of Orsi's claims regarding the uniqueness of devotion to Jude in American Catholic practice, I find this a respectful and provocative book with much to say about the lives of American Catholic women.