On January 7th here in Canada we honour one of our most beloved homegrown saints, André Bessette (1845-1937), a humble lay-brother who went on to found Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. A sickly boy, baptized with the name Alfred, he was brought up in a difficult childhood mired in poverty in rural Quebec, his lumberjack father was killed by a falling tree, leaving his wife a 40 year-old widow with ten children, when Alfred was but ten, His mother also died a few years after that, and the orphaned Alfred was sent to live with relatives, struggling to find his vocation and path in life. He worked at various jobs around Montreal and in the northern United States, before finally joining the Congregation of the Holy Cross in Montreal. Undernourished, undersized and undereducated, he was at first refused, and was accepted only at the intervention of Bishop Ignace Bourget, who had received a recommendation from Alfred’s own pastor that ‘I am sending you a saint’
And so he was. It seems religious life was good for Brother André – the name he adopted in religion. Although often in precarious health, he went on to live a full 91 years, vigorous and sharp in mind and soul until his dying day. His task was porter, and as he joked that, ‘when he joined the Order, his superiors right away showed him the door…’
What would have been a quiet, hidden life became quite public, as the new brother, who by discipline, prayer and a spiritual asceticism, but most of all with humour and humility (which always go together), achieved a deep holiness. He was soon widely renowned, at least by those with eyes to see, and sought out as a confidant and miracle-worker. Brother André would invariably send those who sought healings of various sorts to Saint Joseph – Ite ad Joseph – Go to Joseph! Soon an unending streams of the sick and troubled came to him – just as they had come to Christ. Brother André would say a prayer with them and often rub them with a salve of ‘Saint Joseph’s oil’, often followed by countless physical, and spiritual, cures, inexplicable, at least by earthly, scientific means.
The Order had to depute four secretaries to handle the deluge of mail he received, and when good Brother André died on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, January 6th, 1937, a million people lined past his coffin. He was beatified by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1982, and canonized on October 17, 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI. God does indeed exalt the lowliness and hiddenness of His servants.
The miracles, which continue to this day, are too numerous to count; healings abounded, and so did the crowds, so that the good brother had to meet them in the trolley station across the road from the convent. The good brother did not do much, in earthly terms, and his advice often quite quotidian. One time, Brother André walked by a sick boy in the hospital, and just told him as he passed by the hall to ‘go outside and play’. And so the boy did, fully cured.
But each and every healing Brother André attributed to Saint Joseph, saying that he himself did nothing much at all. In honour of the husband of Mary and foster-father of Christ, Brother André began raising funds for a fitting monument to his patron. That is the grand Oratory of Saint Joseph that now overlooks the city of Montreal today, a whole story in itself. At his death, in the midst of the Great Depression, the magnificent structure was left unfinished, with no roof, but was completed in the decades afterward.
The great basilica, with its magnificent dome, visible from many miles away as one drives into the city, is a bold testament to Quebec’s, and Canada’s, still-visible Catholicism, now on life-support, perhaps, but a sign that such faith as ‘little André’s’ is already there incipiently in the thousands of pilgrims who still stream to the Oratory, some climbing the many steps on their knees. And we may hope that such faith, which can quite literally move mountains, may flourish once again in la belle province, and across this fair Dominion.
Saintly Brother André, priez pour nous!
