Back in September, we celebrated the feast of St Matthew. And just last week, we celebrated the St Luke, the Evangelist. Because of their importance in the Early Church and their importance in the history of Christianity, we celebrate all of the the apostles and the Evangelists in our Church’s liturgical calendar. This brings us to the feast of St Simon and St Jude, which we celebrate on October 28th each year, and which we are celebrating with all of you at CMCF this weekend.
You might wonder: Why would we celebrate St Simon and St Jude together when many of the other apostles have their own individual feast day? As best we can tell, Simon and Jude are associated with each other and celebrated on the same feast day because, according to tradition, they were missionaries together in Persia and Mesopotamia, with both being martyred in Persia. From Sacred Scripture, we don’t know a lot about them, other than that they are included on the list of apostles. Tradition holds that Simon was a member of the Zealots, a nationalistic group in Ancient Israel that hoped that the Messiah would come to liberate them from the foreign powers that had occupied their country.
The Christian faithful have the practice of praying to saints for their help. However, because St Jude has a similar name to Judas, and Judas is the one who betrayed Jesus, very few people were turning to St Jude with their prayers, so it is said that St Jude who go out his way to help anyone who prayed to him, even with the most impossible things.
Here in the South, St Jude hospital in Memphis is very famous. And the founding of that hospital was the work of the American entertainer Danny Thomas. Thomas struggled, a devout Catholic, struggled in the early years of his career to get work.
As a young man, Danny Thomas had a simple goal: to entertain people and be successful enough at it to provide for his wife and family. But work wasn’t easy to come by. This brought his a lot of anxiety and despair.
He turned to St. Jude Thaddeus in his prayers, seeing St Jude as the patron saint of hopeless causes. He prayed to St Jude one night when he was in Detroit: “Show me my way in life, and I will build you a shrine.”
That prayer to St. Jude marked a pivotal moment in his life. Soon after, he began finding work, eventually becoming one of the biggest stars of radio, film and television in his day. Danny used his fame to fulfill his vow to St. Jude Thaddeus and to change the lives of thousands of children and families. Danny Thomas’ spiritual mentor was Cardinal Samuel Stritch, the Archbishop of Chicago, who had been a priest in Memphis and Nashville. Stritch is the one who suggested to Thomas that he found his hospital dedicated to St Jude in Memphis. By 1955 Danny and a group of Memphis businessmen decided that the hospital should be more than a general children’s hospital. At the time, the survival rate for childhood cancers was 20%, and for those with acute lymphoblastic leukemia — the most common form of childhood cancer — only 4% of children would live. Look at all the lives of families who have been touched by Danny Thomas’ devotion to St Jude and the building of this hospital as a shrine to St Jude and the way he help those was are in desperate need of help.
The Basilica of St Peter in Rome and the Church of St Sernin in Toulouse, France both claim to have the remains of Simon and Jude, so we are not entirely sure where they are buried. We do not know many of details about the apostles, but we do know that they passed down the fact to us through great sacrifice and suffering.
As we hear in the Gospel today of the 12 apostles whom Jesus called by name, we know that they were not the richest, not the most intelligent, not the most politically connected, but rather they were men who had great flaws and weaknesses. We can take away this message from our celebration of St Simon and St Jude today: In the midst of all our human weaknesses and failings, the Lord calls us to be his followers, to live out our faith as best we can in the reality of our lives. May we all hear that call.
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