Word to the Wise
Saturday, October 28, 2006 - Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude, apostles
[Ephesians 2:19-22 and Luke 6:12-16][Y]ou are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.
When we join a group, it is normal to want to know who else is involved, or how it was founded and what it's "mission statement" might be. The Catholic Church makes a point of its "apostolic" foundation. This is one of the four "marks" of the Church that we learned in our catechism and which we profess in the Nicene Creed every Sunday. But, what if we wanted to know who these people are that are supposedly the "foundation" of the church? There's precious little information about some of them. The one who managed to be forever associated in our consciousness with treachery and betrayal is Judas Iscariot! Peter, James (one of two by that name) and John get a kind of prominence in the gospel. Thomas is noted for his skepticism. Jude gets to ask a question in John 14:22 and there is a very brief letter attributed to him. Thaddeus Jude and Simon the Zealot are honored together. About Simon we know almost nothing except that he might be considered a "terrorist" in our time. The Zealot party was very anti-Roman. Jude came to acquire the title, Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. I remember that my sister, Ann, (God rest her) was a devotee of him. The Dominicans of the Central Province, headquartered in Chicago, have a big shrine to St. Jude, and I preached a novena there once, complete with a relic, supposedly a piece of the arm of St. Jude! There is a well-known hospital named for him in Memphis, TN, for children with cancer. The popularity of a particular apostle or saint is often the result of the needs of ordinary faithful people. We all need our heros and heroines. Hopeless cases need a patron and Jude fills the bill! AMEN
config
view
logs
3840.0 KB
62 ms
4
