Simon is called the Zealot in Luke and Acts, and the Cananean in Matthew and Mark — two renderings of the same designation, marking him as a man of fierce devotion to the Law, perhaps once attached to the movement that resisted Roman rule. Jude, also called Thaddeus, is distinguished in John's Gospel from Judas Iscariot, and it is he who asks at the Last Supper, "Master, what happened that you are going to reveal yourself to us and not to the world?" The Lord's answer — that whoever loves him will keep his word, and that the Father and he will come and make their dwelling with him — is the Gospel of the feast in one of its options. The Church attributes to Jude the short canonical Letter of Jude, which urges the faithful to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints and closes with the doxology to the God who is able to keep them from stumbling. The two apostles are commemorated together because their relics have long been venerated in the same Roman church, and the joint celebration passed from there into the General Roman Calendar. Red vestments are worn, and the first reading is again the passage from Ephesians on the household of God built upon the foundation of the apostles, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Popular devotion to Saint Jude as the patron of desperate and seemingly hopeless causes is widespread; its origin is often explained by the reluctance of the faithful to invoke a name so close to that of the traitor, so that his intercession was left, as it were, in reserve. The Church has never discouraged the practice, provided it remains prayer and does not slip into superstition.

Feast

feast

October 28

feast