Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes by Robert A. Orsi (review)

526book reviews the estabUshment of the CathoUc Interracial Council of New York and the interracial movement, and LaFarge's opposition to communism, fascism, and racism.Two cases which receive great attention are LaFarge's relationship with the Federated Colored Catholics (FCC) and the closing of the Cardinal Gibbons Institute in southern Maryland. Professor Southern argues that John LaFarge steered the FCC away from the mission of its founder, Dr.ThomasWyattTurner, as a CathoUc African-American protest organization toward the less confrontational interracial approach. The closing of the Cardinal Gibbons Institute involved a protracted battle with the principal and assistant principal of the school,Victor and Constance Daniel. From these two cases, LaFarge's reputation emerges battered and stained. In the remaining biographical chapters, Professor Southern examines LaFarge 's and the Catholic interracial movement's responses to the race question through the "hot" and "cold" wars, the civü rights movement in the pre- and post-Brown decision era, and the final years ofJohn LaFarge's Ufe.The final two chapters of the book provide a summary about John LaFarge's interracial work within American CathoUcism and a postscript on black CathoUcism. Professor Southern has written a very interesting and intriguing book which examines not only the life of a pioneer Catholic interraciaUst but also examines in a thorough manner the CathoUc efforts to address the American dUemnia. He poses some very provocative questions and offers historical interpretations which deserve further discussion and study. His concluding Unes Ui the summation of LaFarge jump off the page: "StUl, for roughly three decades LaFarge was the primary spokesman for the American CathoUc church on black-white relations.This fact alone speaks volumes about the church's past record in facing up to the American dUemma" (p. 375). Martin Zielinski Mundelein Seminary Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. By Robert A. Orsi. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. Pp. xxiU, 303. $30.00.) St. Jude was for me, as a Protestant chUd in a heavily CathoUc neighborhood, the single most powerful symbol of CathoUcism's fundamental otherness. It was the eroticism of the standard Jude image that bothered me most, I think— and perhaps the effeminate overtones that were there as weU.A largely unconscious class snobbery was probably also at work: the image ofJude is somehow mixed up in my mind with memories of the long-defunct Detroit Times, a Hearst paper which "educated" people simply didn't read."Thank you, St. Jude" notices in the paper's classified section are a likely source of the association. More basic to the link, however, was the aUenness of the world to which both BOOK REVIEWS527 the Times and the notices belonged—a world, to my suburban eyes, of unimaginable ignorance and impossibly narrow horizons. St. Jude is not so great a problem for my adult self, or at least for my adult scholarly self. I've come to appreciate the rich possibLUties attendant on the study of Catholic devotionaUsm. StUl, doubts and residual prejudice linger, especiaUy with regard to the implications of devotionaUsm for a mostly female clientele. So I was more than ripe for Robert Orsi's masterful analysis of the American cult of St. Jude. Orsi explores the ambiguous meaning of the Jude devotion for the women who were his principal petitioners, uncovering both its regressive and empowering aspects. Jude was at once a figure intended to discipline women by reconciling them to lives of submission and pain, and a means by which they found voices of their own and space in which to act on their desires. The Jude devotion in America is of recent origin: the first (and, as it happens, the pre-eminent) shrine was estabUshed at a South Chicago church in 1929The Depression seems to have been instrumental in the cult's swift rise to popularity , and not only because ofJude's role as the patron of hopeless causes.Jude, as Orsi notes, was peculiarly without national or ethnic associations. As such he was an evocative figure for CathoUcs just emerging from their various "ethnic enclaves" to confront a disaster that was national in scope—something that was even truer of...