MEXICO CITY – Arturo Rodríguez asked St. Jude Thaddeus “for a big favor.” A chauffeur in Mexico City, Rodríguez said a relative was robbed and slashed with a knife almost a decade ago, but made a miraculous recovery after the chauffeur prayed to St. Jude Thaddeus.
Rodríguez, 31, confessed he doesn’t attend his local parish all that often. “But I’m here every 28th,” he said from the St. Hippolytus Church in central Mexico City, where St. Jude is celebrated on the 28th of every month, not just on his official feast day of Oct. 28.
St. Jude is known as the patron saint of difficult and desperate causes. It’s a devotion that’s found fertile ground in Mexico, where millions confront difficult and desperate problems in their daily lives.
Devotees like Rodríguez articulate an almost transactional faith, in which they ask St. Jude for intervention and promise to repay him with monthly visits to one of the many shrines erected in his honor around the country.
Such faith also covers the complications of life in Mexico and a devotion embraced by rich and poor alike, along with police and prisoners – and even people acting outside the law.
Rodríguez recently entered the monthly St. Jude celebrations wearing a mask emblazoned with an image of convicted drug cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
“Many say he helped people and the government didn’t. What he earned, he shared with the people,” Rodríguez said.
The devotion uncomfortably covers the legal and illegal, a line that’s often blurred in Mexico “as much for the police as people involved in illegalities,” said Rolando Macías, an ethno-historian who has studied St. Jude.
Such is the popularity of St. Jude that Macías ranked it Mexico’s second-most popular devotion.
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