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

Orsi, Robert A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300064764 ISBN 13: 9780300064766

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert A. Orsi is professor of religious studies at Indiana University.

From Publishers Weekly:

As devotion to saints go, the devotion to Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, is relatively recent. Established in Chicago in 1929, the cult of St. Jude attracted the devotion of numerous immigrant Catholic women who were confronted with the difficulty of establishing new lives for themselves and their families in the U.S. In this engaging social history, Orsi expores the variety of ways that their devotion to St. Jude helped these women survive the pressures of surviving in a foreign land caught in the throes of the Depression. Orsi uses interviews and letters to various periodicals like the Shrine of St. Jude's promotional magazine, the Voice of St. Jude, to explore the variety of reasons that women rather than men comprise the majority of St. Jude's devotees. He even goes behind the scenes at the Shrine to discover that Father Robert, who is the ostensible director of the Shrine, doesn't exist, and that the Shrine itself is run primarily by women. Finally, Orsi examines the paradoxical nature of this saint, who answers prayers as long as the recipients of the saint's responses tell others about the saint. Orsi's book takes a fascinating and compelling look at American cultural and religious history.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0300064764
• ISBN 13: 9780300064766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336