Fr. Jude was born Leo Molnar on October 20, 1934, in Cleveland, Ohio where he grew up. In 1957, at the age of twenty-three, he joined the Franciscans and professed first vows two years later. While studying philosophy and theology at Catholic University in Washington, D.C, he organized seminarians of various denominations and stood vigil with them for fifty-seven days in 1964 at the Lincoln Memorial as a congressional filibuster blocked the Civil Rights Act. In 1966, he was ordained to the priesthood at the age of thirty-three.
Two years later, he was assigned to Franciscan mission territory in Paraguay where he served people in three rural parishes that stretched across a territory fifty miles long and thirty-five miles wide. He traveled by horse or mule as he ministered to the people there, caring for their spiritual needs and sometimes tending to their physical illnesses. He built and sustained seven one-room elementary schools. In the third year of this ministry, Fr. Jude contracted malaria and hepatitis and had to return to the U.S. to recover.
Back in the U.S, Fr. Jude taught high school in St. Cloud, Minnesota and Warren, Ohio before accepting the chaplaincy at Fairmont State College in 1974 and came to the Newman Center, then located in a house on Fairmont Avenue. For thirty-eight years, he ministered to anyone who came to the Newman Center. He preached the Gospel Sunday after Sunday, baptized children, celebrated marriages, sat with the sick, presided over funerals, and comforted the bereaved. He organized crews to help people whose homes had burned down. He helped students who needed a place to live, who were short of rent, whose cars had broken down, or whose visas had expired. One summer, when the Soup Opera was on the brink of not being able to pay its staff members, Fr. Jude provided a check to help it make its payroll. He asked that no mention be made of him or the Newman Center. He was a stalwart reminder of Jesus’ commandment to love one another; as the chaplain, Jude made the parishioners at the Newman Center better people, more human and more loving.
In 2010 when Fr. Jude became ill, the bishop forced him to retire. Paul and Peggy Edwards took him into their home where he lived until he died June 1, 2016. He left behind four important groups of writing.
The Meditations are brief reflections for the beginning and ending of each Sunday liturgy in the three-year cycle of the Roman Catholic lectionary. The opening meditations were, like introits, to focus people’s minds and hearts. The closing meditations were exhortations to sum up the liturgy and remind them that the Gospel they had heard needed to be lived out.
Jude also wrote an autobiography, A Brief Life of a Modern Day Shaman, and collected a series of brief inspirational passages collected as Readings. He also reflected on various spiritual readings; those reflections are here under The Meaning of Life.
These writings, like Fr. Jude’s life, show that he truly was God’s lion as his baptismal name, Leo, suggested.