St Jude the Apostle

The holy Apostle Jude, one of the Twelve, was descended from King David and was the son of Righteous Joseph the Betrothed by his first wife, and so is called the Brother of the Lord. At first, as the Gospel says, the Lord's brothers did not believe in Him, but Jude came to faith and was numbered among the Apostles; humbly, he calls himself in his Epistle only "the servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James." After Pentecost he preached the Gospel in many lands, and tradition says he died a martyr. His short Epistle, part of the New Testament, calls Christians to "contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." Orthodox Christians honor him with all the Twelve Apostles and pray to him for firmness in the true faith, while Catholic friends know him well as the saint of hopeless causes.

'Patron of lost causes / hopeless cases' is a Western, chiefly Catholic devotion (revived in the 19th century in Italy and Spain and spread in the US through the Claretians' National Shrine of St Jude in Chicago, 1929); it is not an Orthodox patronage. The Orthodox calendar keeps him on 19 June and at the Synaxis of the Twelve (30 June), and identifies him as the son of Joseph the Betrothed; the West keeps Sts Simon and Jude on 28 October and usually identifies him with Thaddeus. In Russian he is named Iuda, a name not given at baptism, so name days are rare.