For parishioner, a visit to the relic of St. Jude leaves lasting memory

“Most often, the work of the Saints will go unnoticed and unseen,” wrote Father Steve Grunow, in a 2017 Word on Fire article. “Saints are not celebrities, and those saints who capture the attention of the world, view that renown as the imposition of a cross.”

How very appropriate, I thought, while looking at a parishioner’s photo of a painting of St. Jude which had been on display during a tour of the saint’s arm relic to her parish, St. Jude, Blairstown.

In her personal reflection of the experience, she explains that, on the night of the exhibit, she and her daughter went to venerate the relic of St. Jude, a saint who has captured the attention of the world, entering through the chapel and moving to the sanctuary where “a powerful, emotional painting of St. Jude” was displayed. “His eyes seeming so life like … I could feel this presence. I prayed for all the problems in the world, and peace among everyone, our family, and especially for my daughter and myself,” she wrote, saying that she “talked extensively to him.”

Then feeling as if she may have asked for too much, she prayed that “if he would remember everything, could he please give me some kind of sign,” and then she thanked him.

As she and her daughter left through the chapel, they looked at St. Jude’s painting through a glass wall. There they saw the reflection of an image of the cross of Jesus, as if it were protruding from St. Jude’s right shoulder, and the lower part of the crucifix looked like bleeding from the cross.

“This is my sign,” she thought. “He heard me.”

Saints may “disappear into the mission of the Church,” as Father Grunow writes, but the faithful see them as active in their lives, sometimes through small signs and wonders, those that can be explained and those that cannot.

“Holiness is the most attractive face of the Church,” Pope Francis declared in Gaudete et Exsultate, Rejoice and Be Glad. The saints remind us daily of our own call to holiness.

Pope Francis reminds us, too, writing, “The Lord has chosen each one of us ‘to be holy and blameless before him in love.’”

There are saints among us.