Thank You, Saint Jude: Women's Devotions to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes.

Robert A. Orsi's 1985 study of Italian-American spirituality in an East Harlem parish, The Madonna of 115th Street, was one of the past decade's most influential works of American Catholic scholarship. Orsi blended ethnography, social history, and narrative theology so skillfully that popular, devotional Catholicism, a subject until then largely ignored by scholars, quickly achieved unprecedented crossover status as a legitimate field of inquiry, even for secular-minded academics. Orsi's description of the annual parish festa honoring Our Lady of Mount Carmel - its sights, sounds, and aromas - was so vivid the book became a kind of unofficial guide to the festa itself.

Orsi's new book, Thank You, Saint Jude, similarly begins in an urban, ethnic setting: the Mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel, located in South Chicago "at the eastern edge of the area's Mexican community." In 1924, not long after the chapel was founded by a Chicago Jesuit, Cardinal-elect George Mundelein asked the Claretian Missionaries, a Spanish order, to assume responsibility for the mission to Chicago's Mexican-Americans. The most dedicated and energetic of those Claretians, Father Jaime Tort, cultivated a special devotion to Saint Jude Thaddeus who, despite his role as one of Christ's apostles, was nevertheless "so unfamiliar to North American Catholics that Father Tort could not find a statue of him among Chicago's many retailers of religious objects and was finally compelled to commission one based on a Spanish image (possibly the holy card) in his possession." Soon the streets surrounding the new church Father Tort had built in Saint Jude's honor were filled with supplicants. By 1937 the Voice of Saint Jude (now U.S. Catholic) - official organ of what had by then become Saint Jude's National Shrine - was receiving "thousands of letters daily."

Orsi's subject in Thank You, Saint Jude is not, however, a local site of Catholic devotionalism. Although the National Shrine of Saint Jude "is located inside a Mexican parish," Orsi argues that "local place was of no special significance to the shrine's devout," because "modern Catholic devotionalism took as easily to the airwaves and highways as it did to the ways of Madison Avenue." Jude's "territory of grace" quickly stretched from coast to coast. And yet, Orsi explains, "there was in fact, a way that place mattered to them a great deal," for the shrine assumed a uniquely national significance in an era - roughly the late 1920s to the middle '50s - when Catholic Americans, especially the "immigrants' daughters" who are the real subject of this fascinating book, struggled to reconcile the demands of their intimate devotional subculture and external forces of change.

Orsi's shift in focus from the ethnic particularism of The Madonna of 115th Street to the "oddly unencumbered, even disassociated" world of female devotions to Saint Jude yields a deeper engagement with themes from post-immigrant American Catholic history, especially the "gendered" nature of Catholic devotionalism. For while the National Shrine of Saint Jude was administered by men (and the Voice of Saint Jude was even edited by a fictional "Father Robert"), the overwhelming majority of devotees were women, who petitioned Saint Jude in the throes of hopeless personal situations that nearly always implicated men: real or imagined, absent or present.

"Here is my story," begins one of the many narrative petitions that are at the heart of the book. Whether facing a drunken husband, the pressures of combining work with childrearing, or an inconsolable loneliness, Orsi finds that Saint Jude's "devout had come to believe that there was absolutely nothing they could do, for themselves or for their stricken loved ones....The awful belief that God, too, had abandoned them in the dangerous moment, an off-repeated sentiment among the Shrine's correspondents, was the most dreadful expression of this sense of a closed future." Out of the testimonies of female devotees - culled not just from the files of the Voice of Saint Jude but from personal interviews and statements recorded via a toll-free telephone number - Orsi has constructed a "social history of hopelessness" that subtly links "the historically contingent and the perennially human" to the prayer lives of his subjects. From the Great Depression to our own time - despite the scorn heaped on Saint Jude by postconciliar skeptics - "the prayers women made to Jude do disclose differences in the way they and the men around them experienced their times - and each other." As targets of "the American Catholic family romance" (that "wonderful, warm, sacred, perfect" fantasy Orsi locates at the heart of devotionalism) women were uniquely prone to fits of hopelessness that only a special saint could console.

Rather than forcing a single interpretation onto his material, Orsi patiently traces the contours of an unfolding relationship between Jude and his female devotees, as they move from uneasy petitioners to authors of their own "narratives of grace." "Women reported that once they had entered the world of the devotion they no longer felt overwhelmed by circumstances; composing their stories they composed themselves." In turn they became fervent champions of Saint Jude "in fulfillment of the devotional promise," and achieved an authority denied them in their everyday lives.

Orsi's respect for his subjects is as clear ("they transformed our conversations into narratives of grace, too," he writes of his interviewees) as his conclusions are ambivalent. "The central political fact of devotionalism is that while it was ostensibly made for women, directed at their hearts and purses, it was made against them, too." Since within the devotional subculture women were "responsible for everything but unable to do anything," they "turned to subterfuge, self-delusion, and magical omnipotence. They entered a regressive relationship with a male protector who filled the spaces vacated by others they had depended on (their fathers and mothers, husbands, priests, and doctors) and brought them deep satisfactions, but at the cost of an authentic engagement with their circumstances and of the renunciation of their adult selves."

While some readers may object to the blend of cultural studies and therapeutic discourse that suffuses Thank You, Saint Jude, it is not Orsi but his subjects who - long before the self-help movement became "fashionable" - spoke eloquently if simply in the language of healing and recovery as a spontaneous response to the saving intercession of Saint Jude in their lives. Orsi himself concludes that Saint Jude was "too volatile" to be confined within any of the categories of gender studies. "Inflected by desire, Jude was not a stable agent of the culture; born in culture and history, he was not a completely trustworthy ally of the self. Figures like Jude are cultural double agents, constituting and destabilizing both culture and self." Sometimes ambivalence is a methodological escape hatch, but in Thank You, Saint Jude Robert Orsi has woven a finely textured narrative that conveys a real fidelity to the spiritual history of "the immigrants' daughters" who rescued a saint from obscurity.

James T. Fisher teaches at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61, to be published next year by the University of Massachusetts Press.