Jude Connection

From Ancora Imparo

Today is both the Feast Day of Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, and it is also the date on which the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886. What's the connection? For starters, the efforts to find the funds to pay for the construction of the pedestal took close to a decade and came close to failing. In March of 1885, the project needed a final 100,000 dollars, and Joseph Pulitzer threw his newspaper, The New York World, into high gear. Over the next seven months, his committee collected 101,000 dollars from 121,000 contributors. 80% of those contributions were less than a dollar each.

Regardless of whether you believe Saint Jude intervened, the pedestal was completed, the statue put in place, and countless dignitaries attended the unveiling of the 151 foot tall statue on this day 122 years ago.

And although Emma Lazarus's poem The New Colossus had yet to be engraved in bronze and placed inside the immense structure on that date, we will close by commenting on the poet's choice of words. The original Colossus was a statue of the Greek god Helios. Originally, the word colossus named "a statue of gigantic size and proportions." It wasn't until the early 1600s that colossus came to name "a person or thing of immense size or power."