When her husband's business got hammered in a brutal economic downturn last year, Maria Aparecida Ferreira Pichirilo, a 44-year-old homemaker, had to go job hunting. But after weeks of looking, Mrs. Pichirilo didn't have a single offer.

With rejections piling up alongside unpaid bills, Mrs. Pichirilo took desperate action: She prayed to St. Expeditus, considered by many Brazilians the patron saint of urgent causes.

In no time, she got a phone call: An import shop needed a salesperson to start right away. "Getting a job in Brazil these days almost qualifies as a miracle," Mrs. Pichirilo says. The word got around. Silmeri da Silva, a friend of hers, recently accompanied Mrs. Pichirilo to the Saint Expeditus Chapel to pray that she'd get a shoe-saleswoman job she had interviewed for. Typically, these days, worshipers at the chapel's Sunday Mass overflow onto the street of the working-class Jacana neighborhood.

St. Expeditus, a previously obscure figure in Roman Catholic tradition, has emerged as the object of cult-like devotion for a growing number of Brazilians. And while the Expeditus phenomenon is reviving interest in the church at a time of mounting incursions by evangelical Protestants, it's also prompting soul-searching on the part of some Catholic leaders about who this man really was and what values he represents.

All over Brazil -- which has 125 million Catholics, more than in any other country -- holy cards, billboards, makeshift altars and Internet sites display depictions of the saint: a soldier holding a cross inscribed with the Latin word hodie, which means "today," while stepping on a raven, inscribed with the word cras, meaning tomorrow. "He's the saint for real-time solutions," says Fernando Altemeyer, a religious-studies professor at São Paulo's Catholic University.

Church officials expect 200,000 people to attend ceremonies in São Paulo marking his April 19 feast day, more than 10 times the turnout from eight years ago. New churches named for Expeditus are springing up throughout the country. A life of Expeditus is the best-seller among saints' biographies offered by Edições Loyola, a religious publisher here, outpacing such perennial favorites as St. Anthony and St. Rita. Two São Paulo radio programs allow Expeditus's adherents to call in with petitions for aid or accounts of answered prayers. The saint's army of professed followers includes a veejay for Brazilian MTV, a professional soccer player, a top model and several politicians.

For all of the fervor inspired by Expeditus, the historical record regarding his life is notably skimpy. According to legend, he was a commander of a Roman legion in Armenia who converted to Christianity and was beheaded by the emperor Diocletian in 303 A.D. But John J. Delaney's authoritative "Dictionary of Saints" says "there is no proof [Expeditus] ever existed."

Some church historians speculate that devotion to the saint may have grown out of an old misunderstanding that occurred when Parisian nuns received a crate of relics from Rome labeled for "expedited" delivery. Mistakenly thinking the label referred to the name of a saint, "they began to propagate devotion to the imagined saint as the saint to be invoked to expedite matters, and the cult soon spread," the Dictionary says.

Scholars who dispute that version claim that Expeditus was venerated in Sicily in the 18th century, well before the shipping incident is said to have occurred.

Expeditus isn't included in the official Roman Catholic martyrology, the calendar of universally recognized saints. But the Vatican "tolerates the veneration of saints who may be of purely local interest," says Lawrence Cunningham, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind.

Notes Mr. Altemeyer: "People who pray to Expeditus are less interested in religious history than in finding an anchor in today's uncertain global economy." Indeed, while the first chapel dedicated to Expeditus was built in São Paulo in 1942, he didn't gain a huge following until the 1990s, when Brazil opened its economy to the world and endured a flurry of financial shocks. Brazil went from the mind-numbing annual inflation rate of 5,000% at the beginning of the last decade, to a brief boom in the mid-1990s, to a raft of currency swoons since then. "Bad economic statistics add up to more followers for Expeditus," says Cecilia Mariz, a scholar on the sociology of religion. Today, with consumer interest rates at 150% and unemployment near 20%, Expeditus is called on a lot.

"One wrong step today and you are in a noose financially," says Sergio Antonio, a 52-year-old municipal maintenance worker, who prayed to the saint when his bank and credit-card debt threatened to spiral out of control.

The dozens of petitions deposited daily in a wicker basket on the altar of the St. Expeditus Chapel offer a litany of economic distress. One appeal, written on a page torn from a diary, asks for the saint's help in paying for kidney dialysis. Another supplicant seeks assistance meeting installment payments for her cellphone. "A very desperate mother" asks for aid with her son's wrongful-dismissal suit against a former employer. It isn't just poor people who are seeking out the saint. An unemployed executive left behind his three-page résumé, detailing his dozen years' experience as a factory manager.

The interest generated by Expeditus has been a blessing to Brazil's Catholic Church, which has lately faced a stiff challenge from evangelical Christians. Spurred by rapid growth of Pentecostal denominations, the Protestants' ranks grew to 15% of the total population in 2000 from 9% in 1991. Part of the appeal of some evangelical groups, such as Brazil's huge Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, is an upwardly mobile ethos that says religion can be a conduit to attaining material well-being.

Nevertheless, while Brazilian Catholics often denigrate the evangelicals' "theology of prosperity," some Catholic leaders acknowledge that Expeditus's followers themselves may be on shaky spiritual ground. "I think some people are confusing the saints with automatic teller machines," says the Rev. Luiz Andrade Meirelles, an educator in the state of Minas Gerais.

Yet Expeditus's influence continues to grow, in direct proportion to the spread of economic anguish. Renato Tadeu Geraldes discovered Expeditus in 1996 after his heavily indebted print shop went out of business. Finding a job in another shop just a few days after praying to the saint, Mr. Geraldes showed his gratitude by printing and distributing 1,000 prayer cards bearing the saint's image. Soon, other converts to the saint sought out Mr. Geraldes to print up cards for them. Mr. Geraldes eventually launched the Editora Santo Expedito publishing company, which now churns out millions of Expeditus cards each month.

Mr. Geraldes paid off his debts and, with his own money, helped build the chapel in Jacana. At the chapel's April 2001 inauguration, a cardinal presided over Mass and a country and Western star gave a free concert. Helicopters dropped petals from 19,000 red roses on the crowd.

Luiz Carlos Santana, pastor of the Door to Heaven Evangelical Mission, just a block away from the chapel, acknowledges that Expeditus's arrival has stolen some thunder from his own services, which include rites to expel evil spirits from congregants. "I will give the Catholics credit for clever marketing," he says.

The pastor at the Expeditus chapel, the Rev. Luiz Cesar Bombonato, says about one-third of his parishioners had previously dropped out of the church or attended only sporadically. Sidinei Camarelli, a 45-year-old handyman, says he'll never miss another Mass if Expeditus helps him get financing for a new pickup truck. "I need that truck for work," he says. "May the saint guide the bank's decision."