“We’re here because of our devotion to St. Jude and all that he has done for us over all the years we’ve been married,” said Agnes Siciliano, 83, inside St. Sebastian Church soon after she and her husband Edward had a moment in front of a first-class relic of St. Jude, the patron saint of “desperate” or “impossible” causes.
Catholics from around the region flocked to the Akron church, on Mull Avenue on the city’s West Side, Thursday afternoon to see and pray in front of the relic of the figure known as “The Apostle of the Impossible.”
The relic, according to the Vatican, is a piece of the saint’s arm bone dating back two millennia. The Sicilianos were first in line.
“We celebrated our 60th anniversary in October,” she said. “Twenty-seven years ago my husband needed a liver transplant. Through the 27 years he’s had so many other ailments, heart attacks. And now he’s on dialysis, so we pray to St. Jude. Of course, he still wears the medal.”
Edward unzipped his blue jacket and pulled out a gold chain from under his yellow sweater.
“It’s right here,” said Edward, proudly holding up the small gold pendant. “He’s been very good to us. I’m doing well. I’m 86 years old – I’m lucky to be here, and I appreciate that.”
The reasons the faithful flock to see the relic are varied, explained the Rev. John Valencheck, the pastor of St. Sebastian Parish.
“Some of this might be purely historical – this is a historical event, here’s a bone from 2,000 years ago of a person who walked, breathed, bathed, ate, and also talked with Christ,” he said. “It gives them that visceral connection to history and to the faith and our belief system. And some people are moved because there are a lot of miracles connected to St. Jude in general and this relic in particular. Throughout the tour of the relic, there have been healings, not just physical healings but spiritual healings and emotional healings. People are looking for answers, and this is one of the places where you can work that out and be in contact with something so close to the germ of the idea where Western culture came from, where faith came from, where the church came from. It’s about getting back to the basics.”
The bone fragment is housed in a carving of a wooden arm inside a protective glass case. The stop at St. Sebastian Thursday was one of the 100 stops the relic will make throughout the country.
Like the Sicilianos, many others arrived early and lined up outside the church well before worshipers were allowed in at 1 p.m.
“Heck, I got here ‘bout 11:30, figured they’d be lining up by that time. I just sat in my truck across the street for an hour and a half before getting in line and listened to the radio,” said Mike Deorio, who was celebrating his 69th birthday. He sat alone in a pew toward the back of the church shortly after he made his way to the relic at the front of the sanctuary.
He proudly showed off a picture of the relic he took with his cell phone. “The turnout is magnificent – goes to show there’s still faith in God. It’s so neat that something of that significance is still around.”
Bethany Clark, 24, came to the church with her infant daughter and several of her younger siblings – her mother had 13 kids – to pray to St. Jude for her sister.
“It’s impossible for her to give birth so that’s why we pray to St. Jude.”
Clark said she first became aware of St. Jude years ago: “I had heard about him as a child from my grandma. Her dad didn’t want her to get married to my grandpa. So she prayed to St. Jude.”
Her grandparents ended up getting married and named two of their children after St. Jude.
“It’s really not known why he became the patron saint of desperate causes,” explained Valencheck. But “he got a reputation of coming through in prayer, through the intercession of people who prayed to him with Christ. There are many people here with serious illnesses and other difficulties, and they’re looking for his intercession. It’s not necessarily a physical healing. There could be an emotional healing, a spiritual healing.”
Tom and Carol Hicken, 86 and 83, respectively, have been praying to St. Jude for decades and were excited to learn the relic would be in Akron after first hearing about the tour from their daughter in St. Cloud, Minn.
“She told us about it a week before we saw it in their church bulletin here,” Carol said. “She was like ‘oh mom, it was great,’ and I really wished it would come here.”
“St. Jude helped me in so many ways,” Tom said. “I’ve been a patron for 60 years – he answered a prayer. I was praying for a job as a machinist apprentice, and he gave me a sales job with an insurance company. Turned out to be a great thing. I wasn’t that good of a salesman, but it made me pray a lot. I went to Mass every day – I still pray to St. Jude and think about him every day.”
Many of the people who came to pray in front of the relic held up pendants, rosaries and other objects of personal significance to the glass case. Signal Akron asked Valencheck why they were doing this.
“A relic is something similar. A first-class relic is part of the saint, an actual part of the saint, like we have of Padre Pio, the blood from his wounds. Or it might be a bone like this is, and we have a bone of St. Sebastian on our altar,” Valencheck said. “That’s a first-class relic, it takes you right there.
“A second-class relic is something that person might have used, so like a shirt – they used it, they wore it, whatever, it was a part of who they were. A third-class relic is anything that is touched to a first-class relic. There’s nothing magical about it, it’s just that you’ve touched it to a first-class relic and you hold on to it as a special reminder that you touched this to St. Jude.”
