Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus (Church of St. Pius V)

The Dominican Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus was founded within St. Pius V Parish in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. St. Pius V itself had been established in 1874 as a territorial parish by the Jesuits from Holy Family Parish on Roosevelt Road. The original church stood at 18th Place and was replaced in 1884 when construction of a new church began at 19th Street (then called Stewart Avenue) and Ashland, in time for Chicago's first World's Fair and Columbian Exposition. The upper church was finished in 1885; until then services had been held in the basement hall. In the 1880s, after the Jesuits departed, diocesan priests administered the parish until 1925, when the Dominicans assumed responsibility. By 1920, after World War I, many of the original Irish families had moved out and the parish became predominantly Polish. The first Dominican pastor, Fr. William Marchant, O.P., with a large staff of Dominican priests, offered a full range of services in Polish and instituted the Annual Rosary Sunday Outdoor Procession on the first Sunday of October — a traditional Dominican devotion that drew faithful from across the city. An estimated 15,000 people took part in 1933. After the stock market crash of October 1929, the Dominicans founded the Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus within St. Pius V. On Sunday, October 20, 1929, the Shrine held its first public devotions. A crowd began arriving an hour early; by the published starting time so many had filled the church that the friars summoned police and fire departments out of public-safety concern. Officers barred further entry, and by the evening service city personnel had been deployed to manage the crowd outside — it took until midnight for all gathered to pass through and pray. The first novena ended on Monday, October 28, 1929 (the Feast of St. Jude); Black Tuesday fell a week later on October 29. The first shrine feature was a marble altar and statue of St. Jude in the north-wall alcove (where the Shrine has remained ever since), gifted by Miss Anne Profant. The altar included a tabernacle, two shelves of varying height, crimson velvet curtains, a suspended lamp, a fringed canopy bearing the petition 'St. Jude Thaddeus…Pray for us,' wrought-iron candle stands, bracket lights, two tables of vigil candles, and a prie-dieu. Fr. Marchant was reassigned in 1935. Fr. Ralph Goggins, O.P., briefly succeeded him as both Pastor of St. Pius V and Director of the Shrine, before Fr. Vincent Burnell, O.P., took over — shepherding the Shrine through its 10th anniversary in 1939, when an addition was built to expand the Shrine's interior area. By then, the city fire marshal had begun limiting the constellation of vigil lights inside the church on safety grounds. Fr. Burnell oversaw dramatic artistic upgrades by Daprato Studios of Chicago, who clad the alcove in green Alpian Italian marble and covered the dome above in Venetian mosaic centered on the Dominican coat of arms with the Order's mottos Veritas (Truth) and Laudare, Benedicere, Praedicare (To Praise, To Bless, To Preach). The arch surrounding the alcove holds five symbols describing St. Jude's life: a halberd, lance, and inverted cross represent possible instruments of his martyrdom; a boat and boat hook refer to his apostolic missionary journeys. The marble statues added then depict figures representing 'the peoples of the world' — a worker in overalls, a mother with her baby, a businessman, a young woman with a scarf on her head, a nurse, a doctor, a Dominican priest, and a Dominican nun. Fr. Burnell also received the arm relic of St. Jude from the Dominican Province of St. Peter Martyr in Turin, Italy, in 1939. Fr. Edward Hughes, O.P., succeeded Fr. Burnell in 1941 just before the U.S. entered World War II; his tenure coincided with the Shrine's 20th anniversary in 1949 and the 10th anniversary of the newly created Province of St. Albert the Great. Under subsequent pastorates, the parish's surrounding Hispanic population grew sharply from the 1950s onward; St. Pius V became the first parish in the neighborhood to offer Mass in Spanish in August 1963. Today the parish serves a predominantly Spanish-speaking community while the Shrine maintains its English-language Dominican identity, hosting the long-running Thursday novena tradition that began in 1929 and currently the largest publicly displayed relic of an Apostle outside Europe — the arm of St. Jude.