October 28th.  SS. Simon & Jude.

The feast of these two apostles is kept on this one day,  the anniversary of the reception of some of their relics into St. Peter’s in Rome in the 7th century.  Simon is called in the Gospels either the ‘Canaanite’ or the ‘Zealot’, the latter title possibly indicating that he belonged to a strict Jewish sect.  There is more than one tradition as to what happened to him after Our Lord’s Ascension: in one version he preached the Gospel in Syria, while according to another he began in Egypt, then joined St. Jude in Mesopotamia in order to proceed to Persia, where both were martyred.  He is represented in art by a fish, or by a curved sword, the alleged weapon of his martyrdom.  Jude is identified with the apostle recorded by the Gospels as Thaddaeus, and is named as the author of the short New Testament letter of St. Jude – though almost certainly that somewhat hair-raising apocalyptic text is by another and later hand.  Jude is the patron of ‘desperate causes’, possibly because for a long time nobody turned to him for intercession on the grounds that his name was too easily confused with Judas (Iscariot) the betrayer of Christ.  His emblem is a club, used to bludgeon him to death, or a boat, for he is recorded as being a ‘brother of James’, and therefore a relative of the fisherman Zebedee.