National Shrine of St. Jude

The story of the National Shrine of St. Jude is inseparable from the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, the first Mexican Catholic parish established in Chicago. Throughout the early 1910s, Mexican immigrants settled in South Chicago to take low-paying jobs in the steel mills, where they faced poverty and discrimination. In 1923, a larger wave of Mexican workers was brought from Fort Worth, Texas by Illinois Steel. Fr. William T. Kane, SJ, began ministering to the predominantly Catholic immigrants, and by July 1923 Cardinal George Mundelein had been moved — encouraged by Alice Bourke, associate editor of the South Chicago newspaper The Comet — to take action. Within six months a small frame church was erected at 9024 S. Mackinaw Avenue; the original edifice was an old army barracks transported from Michigan. In 1924, Cardinal Mundelein entrusted the mission to the Claretian Missionaries, charging them to minister to the Spanish-speaking population of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The first Claretian arrived in October 1924, and Fr. John Maiztegui, CMF, was named pastor. In 1925, Fr. James Tort, CMF — a Catalan-born Claretian who had served in the Canary Islands and Mexico before fleeing Mexico in 1914 and working in Texas and Arizona — became pastor of the first Spanish-speaking parish in the region. Fr. Tort immediately organized construction of a permanent church. In 1926 the parish purchased land at the corner of 91st and Brandon (some sources say Burley) Avenue in South Chicago for the new edifice. Fr. Tort had a deep personal devotion to St. Jude Thaddeus, then relatively unknown to the general Catholic population in the U.S. Many of his parishioners were steel-mill workers vulnerable to the economic convulsions of the 1920s. Night after night he asked St. Jude to intercede for them. To lift the spirits of his people, Fr. Tort began regular devotions to St. Jude; the first Solemn Novena in honor of the saint was held on February 17, 1929, and devotion grew so rapidly that on the final night of the Solemn Novena that ended on the Feast of St. Jude, October 28, 1929, an overflow crowd of more than 1,000 worshipers packed and surrounded the church. (The date was one day before the 1929 stock-market crash that ushered in the Great Depression.) Word of the novena spread from South Chicago across the country, and during the Depression and World War II thousands of men, women, and children attended the Solemn Novenas; devotion to the 'Patron of Hope' grew into a national movement. The shrine is recognized as the country's only National Shrine of St. Jude acknowledged by the Vatican. The new Our Lady of Guadalupe Church was dedicated on September 30, 1930, formally becoming the first Mexican-American parish in Chicago; at that time the parish served about 8,000 people. The cornerstone had been laid earlier by Bishop Pascual Díaz of Tabasco, then residing in New York after the persecution of Catholic clergy in Mexico. Even during the leanest years of the Depression, parishioners out of work from the mills painted the interior of the new church themselves. Fr. Tort was transferred to a California parish in the mid-1930s after nine years at Our Lady of Guadalupe; ill health and the California climate were cited. In the decades that followed, the Claretians maintained the parish and the National Shrine of St. Jude. By the mid-20th century the parish had also become a popular place of worship for Chicago police officers, who were members of the St. Jude League; roughly 4,000 officers attended Mass at the shrine. The St. Jude League, the devotional organization that gathers petitions from around the world, grew in parallel with the shrine: a common practice among devotees was to publish a thank-you notice in the classified section of American newspapers when a petition was answered. Claretian priests and brothers have continued to staff the shrine and parish continuously since 1924. The shrine is also the bearer of a first-class relic of St. Jude, brought to the church and venerated by pilgrims. The Feast of St. Jude is celebrated annually on October 28, with a special English Mass, a Spanish Mass, and a procession of the relic.