Pilsen — the blessing of the children

Every day, hundreds of people visit the Dominican Shrine of St Jude at Pius V church at 19th and Ashland Ave. Still, I wasn’t expecting a crowd in mid-afternoon.

Nearly a hundred people were in attendance for a ceremony that I’ll call “the blessing of the children.”

The little guy above and I had pretty much the same reaction to this event. And, at least for a few minutes, no one in the church needed recourse to the patron saint of desperate cases, who taught people to persevere in “harsh, difficult circumstances, just as their forefathers had done before them.”