Why Is St. Jude the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes?
No pope ever sat down and assigned Saint Jude to hopeless causes. It grew, the way so many devotions grow, out of the prayers of ordinary people.
The apostle people passed over
Because his name sounded so much like Judas Iscariot's, Jude was overlooked for centuries. Few people prayed to him. An old and much loved tradition says that because so few called on him, he was all the more eager to help those who did, even when their situation was desperate. People tended to come to him last, after they had tried everything and everyone else. And they found that he did not turn them away.
A letter for hard times
The Letter of Jude was written to Christians under real pressure, people being pulled away from the faith. Jude tells them to hold on, to build themselves up in prayer, to keep themselves in the love of God and to trust the One "who is able to preserve you." It is a letter for people in hard places. Read more about his message.
The saints who pointed to him
Saint Bridget of Sweden and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux are both remembered for their devotion to Saint Jude. Tradition holds that our Lord told Saint Bridget in a vision to turn to Jude with great faith and confidence.
Hard times in America
Devotion to Saint Jude grew enormously in the twentieth century. The National Shrine of Saint Jude was founded in Chicago in 1929, right as the Great Depression began, and steelworkers, immigrants and families facing ruin filled the church to pray the novena. Around the same time, a young entertainer named Danny Thomas, broke and unsure of his future, promised Saint Jude that if he would help him find his way, he would build him a shrine. That promise became St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, which opened in 1962 and has cared for children with cancer and other serious diseases ever since.
Still the help of the hopeless
Today people pray to Saint Jude in the United States and Mexico, in the Philippines and India, in Poland and all over the world, usually at the moment they have nowhere else to go. If that is where you are tonight, you are in very good company.