Claretians - St. Jude Shrine, Chicago

St. Jude Shrine, Chicago

The national shirne of St. Jude was founded by Father James Tort, C.M.F., pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Many of Tort’s parishioners were laborers in the nearby steel mills, which were drastically cutting back their work forces early in 1929. This cutback was the precursor of the Stock Market crash.

Tort was saddened to see that about 90% of his parishioners were without jobs and in difficult financial situations. To make the situation worse, unemployment compensation and Social Security benefits did not yet exist. The Claretian pastor saw breadlines being formed in the community. He saw evidence of children being undernourished and his heart went out to his neighbors, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Tort prayed for, and with, his people. He had started construction of a church, but with money extremely scarce he felt the building project would have to be abandoned.

Tort was devoted to Saint Jude Thaddeus, who was relatively obscure to the general Catholic population at that time. During the Middle Ages St. Jude was venerated by many people, but due in part of to his name being mistake for the traitor Judas Iscariot, devotions to him were minimal. Night after night, however, Tort persevered in his prayers to Saint Jude, asking his intercession and promising to erect a shrine in the saint's honor if the church could be finished. In an effort to lift the spirits of his parishioners, Tort began regular devotions to Saint Jude. The first novena honoring the saint was held on February 17, 1929.

During Lent in 1929, Tort noticed many of his parishioners praying before the statue of Saint Jude. When the statues in the church were covered with purple drape during Passion Week, the devotions were so great that he moved the statue to a prestigious stop above an altar on the right side of the church. The congregation at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church showed such great response to the devotion to Saint Jude that an overflow crowd attended services on the final night of a solemn novena that ended on the saint's feast day, October 28, 1929, one day before the stock market crashed. More than 1,000 people stood outside the church to hear the service.

Money came to the church from many places around the US. They never had a surplus of money, but they had enough to get by and the modest shrine to Saint Jude was finally established. Word of the devotions to Saint Jude gradually spread from that tiny corner of Chicago to other parts of the country. During the Depression of the 1930s and during World War II, thousands of men, women, and children attended novenas at the shrine and devotion to the patron saint of desperate causes spread throughout the country.

Because the majority of Saint Jude patrons cannot personally attend novena services (which begin on a Saturday afternoon and end nine days later on a Sunday night), the office of the National Shrine in Chicago distributes novena literature throughout the country to devotees who want to pray the novena by reading the prayers at home or elsewhere.

To this day, the letters that pour into the National Shrine provide inspiring testimony to the desire of the faithful to unite themselves with God through prayers to Saint Jude.